Electronic Notebooks in the Lab and in the Field: Ensuring Metadata and Data are Born Connected
Dr Jens Klump1, Dr Lesley Wyborn2, Dr Penny Crook3
1CSIRO Mineral Resources, Perth, Australia
2Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
3Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Many research activities start with data collection in either the field or the laboratory, some form of manipulation/processing of that data. This first step is followed by the publication of refined results and (hopefully) curation of all input and output research artefacts in persistent repositories that adhere to principles such as FAIR, CARE, TRUST. Unfortunately, it is often only at the final stages, prior to the publication of research, that attention is given to ensuring that metadata/data is compliant with international community agreed standards.
Over the last decade, as Electronic notebooks have become more reliable and robust, they are becoming standard field and laboratory equipment. They offer the potential to streamline research and reduce the time to science by creating standardised Dirt/Benchtop-to-Desktop-to-Publishing-to-Repository workflows to minimise transcription errors and streamline the data creation/acquisition process.
The focus has to be on ensuring that at the initial capture, any data collected is based around community agreed standards to ensure that data is born connected and all the minimum agreed variables for that particular data type are collected.
Early standardisation of data means that field acquisition and laboratory processing tools and algorithms can be shared, and the data immediately interfaces with Laboratory Information Management Systems and Collection Management Systems.
This BoF will have a series of presentations from a wide variety of groups using Electronic Notebooks in the field and the laboratory to seek to leverage common developments and share developments.
Biography:
Jens Klump is a geochemist by training and leads the Geoscience Analytics Team in CSIRO Mineral Resources based in Perth, Western Australia. In his work on data infrastructures, Jens covers the entire chain of digital value creation from data acquisition to data analysis with a focus on data in minerals exploration. This includes automated data and metadata capture, sensor data integration, both in the field and in the laboratory, data processing workflows, and data provenance, but also data analysis by statistical methods, machine learning and numerical modelling.