Towards more reproducible and FAIRer research data: documenting provenance during data acquisition using the Infofile format

Abstract

Information, i.e. data, is regarded as the new oil in the 21st century. The impact of this statement from economics for science and the research community is reflected in the...

LabInform ELN: A lightweight and flexible electronic laboratory notebook for academic research based on the open-source software DokuWiki

“…Bear in mind that no ELN will ever be a turn-key solution and that we need to first gain a thorough understanding of our own processes before we can start mapping them to a digital workflow. Furthermore, the LabInform ELN is but one component of a larger infrastructure for research data management employed by the authors, others being tools for metadata acquisition during data recording [73], a framework for reproducible data analysis [58], a local repository [54], and a LIMS [55]. The interplay of these different components will briefly be described and afterwards other, partly similar solutions mentioned.…”

“…While certainly the purpose of an ELN is to document measurements, machine-actionable metadata recorded during data acquisition should be stored next to the actual data files. This is the realm of the Infofile [73]: While the Infofile aims at collecting all necessary metadata during data acquisition, it does not provide an overview of the measurements (and other actions) that have been done, and does not provide the necessary context in itself.…”

“…Th. Berthold for showing TB the structure and extend of necessary information to a given measurement and for his idea to ensure independence and transferability of this information by storing it in text files located next to the actual data -an early implementation of a distributed ELN that gave birth to the Infofile [73]. K. Heidtke for reassurance that no ELN will ever be a turn-key solution and you need first to understand your processes before you can map them to a digital workflow.…”

“…[46, ch. 5] and the discussion in [73]. Besides the resilience and long-term availabilty and readability of the contents, relying on plain text files in a folder hierarchy on the file system comes with obvious additional benefits: Backups are tremendously sim-plified, as only one directory needs to be backed up.…”

“…using analysis tools [59][60][61][62] based on the ASpecD framework [58], these analyses serve as a quick overview, especially if one does not have a catalogue, and they could eventually be automatically included by the analysis tools via the XML-RPC interface provided by DokuWiki; (v) further plans; (vi) metadata for the measurement as a downloadable code block, e.g. an Infofile [58,59,73].…”