DataPLANT participated in last year's E-Science Days 2021 in various forms. We provided an overview on the Annotated Research Context (ARC), ongoing technical developments for an initial set of annotation tools, and our approach to the use of Data Stewards. We also participated in the NFDI workshop and one of our infrastructure partners, bwSFS - Storage-for-Science, was also present with a poster.

🌱 The Annotated Research Context

• The ARC aims at capturing the entire research cycle and defines a framework for organization, sharing, versioning, reuse, and evolution of research projects.
• It respects FAIR and linked open principles.
• The usage of common spreadsheet software (e.g. Excel) with low system requirements minimizes the friction to the user.
• It provides full metadata annotation based on the ISA model.
• The modular structure facilitates a granular reuse and development of raw data or processing workflows.
• Guided creation and metadata annotation leading to an interface between research communities and public repositories.

Poster by Benedikt Venn et al. - Fostering the democratization of research data by using the Annotated Research Context (ARC) as practical implementation

Paper by Christoph Garth et al. - Immutable yet evolving: ARCs for permanent sharing in the research data-time continuum

🌱 Annotation Tools

Below are examples of two of our tools:

Swate is a Swate Workflow Annotation Tool for the Excel spreadsheet application. It aims to provide a low-friction workflow annotation experience that makes the usage of controlled vocabularies (ontologies) as easy and intuitive as possible. It is designed to integrate in the familiar spreadsheet environment that is the center of a great deal of data-focused wetlab work.

Swobup (Swate OBO Updater) is used to synchronize terms in a previously defined OBO file uploaded to a Github repository by an authorized user. Swobup parses the OBO file and incorporates the changes into the Swate database. The user then has the updated terms available in the Swate tool without having to manually enter individual terms.

Presentation by Jens Krüger et al. - Structuring the Data Jungle of fundamental plant researchers

Paper by Timo Mühlhaus et al. - DataPLANT – Tools and Services to structure the Data Jungle for fundamental plant researchers

🌱 Data Stewards

Data stewards are a core element of our strategy of fostering a good scientific practice and for dissemination of common standards, concepts of research data management and workflow services. Data stewards play a special hinge role between service providers, individual researchers, groups and the wider community. They also help bridging the gap between researchers and technical systems. Project groups and individual researchers will profit from direct support in their daily tasks ranging from data organization to the selection of the proper tools, workflows and standards. DataPLANT invests a significant amount of its budget into data stewards and defines an explicit dispatch model that focuses both on the major research groups as well as core and future participants in the consortium. Our speaker Dirk von Suchodoletz with significant support through professional poster design by our project manager Cristina Martins Rodrigues placed DataPLANT on the winner's podium of the award winners with the poster about our Data Steward concept.

Poster by Dirk von Suchodoletz et al. - Data Stewards as ambassadors between the NFDI and the community

Paper by Dirk von Suchodoletz et al. - Data Stewards as ambassadors between the NFDI and the community

🌱 National Research Data Infrastructure

To conclude the event, Cristina Martins Rodrigues, our project coordinator, presented DataPLANT as one of nine scientific consortia of the first NFDI funding round during its workshop. A collection of the contributions can be found in the corresponding paper. At the moment there is a lot going on in the NFDI association. It remains exciting!

Paper by Sophie Kraft et al. - Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI)

🌱 bwSFS - Storage-for-Science

The storage system bwSFS (Storage-for-Science) is one of the major technical infrastructures for the NFDI consortium DataPLANT and further as well as the Science Data Center BioDATEN. It forms the geo-redundant distributed technical platform for basic storage services, research data management and sharing of data both during ongoing research and through data publication in the various project phases. The system providing traditional SMB/NFS as well as object storage has a solid hardware base with modern monitoring and various redundancies, some of which extend beyond the site boundaries.

Paper by Dirk von Suchodoletz et al. - Storage for Science – Aktueller Stand und anstehende Entwicklungen eines verteilten FDM-Systems

The date for the E-Science Days 2023 has already been set. The next conference with the slogan Empower Your Research - Preserve Your Data will take place in Heidelberg from March 1-3, 2023. So keep up to date via @ESciTage.

Link collection
Paper
ARC
DataPLANT Tools
DataStewards
NFDI bwSFS

Posters and Presentation
ARC
DataPLANT Tools
DataStewards

Further Links
NFDIeV
E-Science-Tage
@ESciTage