Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) are the key principles behind the data generated through SPARC funded projects. SPARC does an amazing job at standardizing the way various datasets are presented on SPARC data portal. The datasets are hosted on the Pensive discover platform and are publicly available. Hence datasets over multiple organs, species, and datatypes generated through research initiatives across more than 50 institutes are curated and shared by SPARC offering better opportunities for multidisciplinary multi-institutional research initiatives.
With such diversity in data generating sources, to meet FAIR standards, there's a need for a structured, standardized, informative and user friendly way of organizing the raw data. SPARC portal is based on the metadata hosted on Pensive.io. The current form of the metadata includes the contributor information, study information, relational identifiers and participant information. This forms a rich source of information for any given dataset available on the SPARC portal. But this only provides an archival ability to the SPARC portal. We realized that this could be changed to "life-cycle" monitoring of the dataset.
As a contribution to the SPARC portal we argue that by simply tracking the activity and providing a platform for discussion over a dataset would result in a healthy peer review system and cross communication among the researchers interested in using the datasets or protocols present on the SPARC portal. By tracking the research articles that are using and citing the dataset and showcasing them on SPARC portal would have several benefits:
- Researches can quickly followup on findings and results presented in research papers utilising a dataset present on SPARC.
- Interested researchers can quickly find the contributors (not only the contributors involved in the dataset creation but also those who provide further findings and results).
- Encourages the multidisciplinary essence of the SPARC initiative. For example if a neuroscientist sees an engineering research article citing the dataset at SPARC portal he/she/they may have new inspiration or interest in collaboration.
- Advertises the research articles that uses dataset present on SPARC platform.
- Discussions among the contributors and users of a dataset can lead to better understanding of the dataset and how to interact with the dataset.
In the new SDS 2.0 Metadata design, both experimental parameters and resources wre added as their own respective files to be added to the metadata. Our team found these two files to be interrelated, and wanted them to work seamlessly together, as our own personal experience in field has taught us the value of linking specific equipment to the functions that they perform. After filling out experimental parameters and a list of resources used in the experiment, our solution finds relationships between the parameters required by an experiment, and the tools used to achieve these conditions. From there, researchers can feel more confident in the replicability of their work. This would integrate into the SPARC Portal as a visualization of the experimental parameters and their relationship to the resources used.
This is a fully open source and distributed under MIT LICENSE See LICENSE for more information.
- Ashutosh Singh (Lead)
- Nathan LoPresto (SysAdmin)
If you would like to suggest an idea to this project, please let us know in the issues page and we will take a look at your suggestion. Please use the enhacement tag to label your suggestion.
If you would like to add your own feature, feel free to fork the project and send a pull request our way. This is an open source project so we will welcome your contributiobs with open arms. Refer to our Contributing Guildeines and Code of Conduct for more information. Add a GitHub Star to support active development!
We would like to thank the organizers of the 2021 SPARC Codeathon