The University of California’s Digital
Library (CDL) and its partners today (Oct. 2) launched
DataUp, a free data management tool.
Researchers struggling to meet new data
management requirements from funders, journals and their own
institutions now can use the DataUp Web application and a
Microsoft Excel add-in to document and archive their tabular
data.
“DataUp will change the way scientists do
their work, making it easy for them to manage and preserve
their spreadsheet data for future use,” said Bill Michener,
principal investigator for the DataONE project.
Scientific datasets have immeasurable
value, but they are useless without proper documentation and
long-term storage. Data sharing also is strongly encouraged in
the scientific community but is not the norm in many
disciplines, including Earth, ecological and environmental
sciences. DataUp addresses these issues.
CDL partnered with the Gordon and Betty
Moore Foundation, Microsoft Research Connections and DataONE
to create the DataUp tool, which is free to use and creates a
direct link between researchers and data repositories. CDL
also announces today that the DataUp project has been
contributed to the Outercurve Foundation’s
Research
Accelerator Gallery.
The DataUp add-in operates within a
program many researchers already use: Microsoft Excel. The Web
application allows users to upload tabular data in either
Excel format or comma-separated value (CSV) format. Both the
add-in and the Web application allow users to:
·
Perform
a “best practices check” to ensure data are well-formatted and
organized
·
Create
standardized metadata, or a description of the data, using a
wizard-style template
·
Retrieve
a unique identifier for their dataset from their data
repository
·
Post
their datasets and associated metadata to the repository.
Although
hundreds of data repositories are available for archiving, many scientific researchers either are unaware
of their existence or do not know how to access them. One of
the major outcomes of the DataUp project is the ONEShare
repository, created specifically for DataUp, where users can
deposit tabular data and metadata directly from the tool.
An added advantage of ONEShare is its
connection to the DataONE network of repositories. DataONE
links existing data centers and enables users to search for
data across participating repositories by using a single
search interface. Data deposited into ONEShare will be indexed
and made available by any DataONE user, facilitating
collaboration and enabling data re-use.
“DataUp is uniquely positioned because it
improves the quality and documentation of data in Microsoft
Excel, the tool of choice for many researchers who would
otherwise not participate in data preservation initiatives,”
said Matthew Jones, Director of Informatics at UC Santa
Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and
Synthesis. “Scientific synthesis will benefit tremendously
from the infusion of these small but information-rich data
sets from Excel into the DataONE ecosystem of shared data.”
CDL envisions the future of DataUp
directed by the participating community at large. Interested
developers can expand on and increase the tool’s functionality
to meet the needs of a broad array of researchers. Code for
both the add-in and Web application
is open source and participation in its
improvement is strongly encouraged.
UC3 is a creative partnership bringing together the expertise and resources of the University of California. Together with the UC libraries, we provide high quality and cost-effective solutions that enable campus constituencies — museums, libraries, archives, academic departments, research units and individual researchers — to have direct control over the management, curation and preservation of the information resources underpinning their scholarly activities. For more information, visit www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/.
About Microsoft Research Connections
The program collaborates with and supports
the work of the world’s top academic researchers and
institutions. It establishes partnerships to advance the state
of the art in computer science and develop technologies that
fuel data-intensive scientific research. By connecting leading
researchers around the world, Microsoft Research Connections
aspires to accelerate the scientific discoveries and
breakthroughs that respond to some of the world’s most urgent
global challenges. Fellowships, grants and awards from
Microsoft Research Connections help to inspire the next
generation of computer scientists and the broader research
community.
About the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The foundation is
committed to making a meaningful difference in environmental
conservation, patient care and scientific research. Gordon
Moore, co-founder of Intel, and his wife, Betty, established
the foundation in 2000 to create positive outcomes for future
generations. The Moore Foundation focuses on that goal around
the world and in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more
information, visit
www.Moore.org.
About DataONE
DataONE serves as the
foundation of innovative environmental science through a
distributed framework and sustainable cyber-infrastructure,
meeting the needs of science and society with open,
persistent, robust and secure access to well-described and
easily-discovered Earth observational data. It is supported by
a $20 million award from the National Science Foundation’s
DataNet program. With coordination nodes at the University of
New Mexico, University of California, Santa Barbara and the
University of Tennessee, DataONE is a collaboration of
universities and government agencies teamed up to organize and
present vast amounts of diverse, inter-related, but often
heterogeneous scientific data.
About the Outercurve
Foundation
The Outercurve
Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation providing software
IP management and project development governance that help
organizations develop software collaboratively in open-source
communities for faster results. The Outercurve Foundation is
the only open-source foundation that is platform, technology
and license agnostic. For more information, contact
info@outercurve.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment