Posted by Laila Puntel
Analyses and Reproducible Research](http://biostats.bepress.com/bioconductor/paper2/) by Robert Gentleman and Duncan Temple Lang.
The dynamic documents are a helpful tool to integrate the computations and code used in data analyses, methodological descriptions, simulations, etc. with the documents that describe and rely on them. This type of document allow us better manipulation of the whole process to deliver a final product in a way than can be easily adjusted according to the audience or purpose. It also allows easier collaboration at all the stages of the working project. The author picked the term compendium to the “living” stage of the document which is a combinations of different elements that make up the document and its computations (i.e. text, code, data, etc.), and as a means for distributing, managing and updating the collection. The compendium frequently rely on a software capable to process the code and solve the problems within the document. And a transformers element to output the final document (can be a web page or a paper). The principal concepts behind a dynamic document are Literate programming that includes tangling and weaving that allows processing and visualization of code and annotations; Reproducible Research which means having all components of the document in one place allowing accessibility for readers and replicability of project; Software components that allows the integration and combination of the code to deliver the desire output, as well as the validation of the compendium; and Language that organize the compendium to accommodate processing (“Definition of the system”). There are several advantages associated with the dynamic documents, but the more relevant from the authors is the facility of reproducibility, having the compendium any reader/ user of the final product is capable to replicate it. The use of this dynamic documents facilitates the interaction between reader and author
As the future of dynamic documents the author distinguished some important aspects. The Multi-language compendiums will be luckily to expect considering that many tasks described in dynamic documents will be carried out using different pieces of software and commands from different languages. The author also pointed out the ability of future necessity of this dynamic documents to be able to reproduce a variety of outputs in order to be understands and use by different audiences. In the long term they discuss the fact that interaction could be enhance by providing interactive facilities with which the readers of the output documents can manipulate and control the computations directly.