As part of their effort to create new solutions to common research problems, Jisc are looking for ideas from individuals and groups with an interest in research data. Please submit your ideas to promote solutions, and offer fresh perspectives for facilitating research data management. Everyone is also invited to vote for their favourite idea, or against other ideas! A simple registration is required in order to participate.

In particular, Research Data Spring is interested in ideas that make it easier to manage research data, especially from the researchers’ perspective (in addition to protocols mentioned within the first theme); in this context, it includes the re-use of data. In other words, Research Data Spring is seeking ideas that will smooth the processes of data management, deposit and re-use within the research lifecycle. This area is closely related with “data creation, deposit and re-use�, but the two are split in order to emphasize that some ideas might be focusing on generic data management support and related protocols and solutions for deposit and re-use, while others would address key disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research aspects.

As of today, the following 25 ideas have been submitted for voters’ considerations:

• Streamlining Deposit: An OJS to Repository Plugin
• Badges as a proxy for peer review of data
• Standards and Schemas for Digital Research Notebooks
• The Lab Box: Solve local backup, work towards rich metadata
• Exchanging experience on RDM integration and interoperability
• Research Data Infrastructure for the Visual Arts (RDIVA)
• Provenance and Packaging
• Standard protocol for research equipment
• A metadata standard to enable automated genealogy generation
• Mock idea: note that title is limited to 68 characters
• Integrated RDM toolkit/service
• Data browsing tools for repositories
• Collaboration tool for qualitative data analysis
• One page micro repositories
• Symplectic for RDM purposes
• DAF Question Bank
• BOOKISH: Infrastructure Sharing for the NLS
• Workshops/Training on Stakeholder Support of Researchers
• Data retrieval via persistent identifiers (DOIs)
• Exporting from DMPonline to data journals
• Linked data notebook
• Use semantic desktop to capture contextual research data
• Streamline repository submissions from Zotero profiles
• Research Data requirements vocabulary
• Cloud Work Bench

The one idea submitted that is relevant to the geo-community comes from EDINA at the University of Edinburgh, and below is a summary of the proposal. If you find it an idea worth supporting, please visit the Research Data Spring website and cast your vote.

Cloud Work Bench

The concept of Cloud Work Bench (CWB) is quite simple – to provide researchers in the geospatial domain (GI Scientists, geomaticians, GIS experts, spatial disciplines) the tools, storage and data persistence they require to conduct research without the need to manage the same in a local context that can be fraught with socio-technical barriers that impede the actual research. By streamlining the availability and deployment of open source software tools, by supporting auto-generated web services and using open data, the work bench concept is geared towards removing the barriers that are inherent in geospatial research workflows – how to deploy the tools you want and have the storage and data management capabilities without the overhead of doing it all yourself. Think of it as an academic Dropbox with additional geospatial software tools and data thrown in…

We propose piloting the CWB approach within the geospatial research community which has a well established and broad user base across academia and industry (reflected for example via the uptake of Jisc’s flagship Digimap service), and also has a mature open source toolset and data stack which are prerequisites to conducting research e.g. Open Street Map, Ordnance Survey Open data, Postgis, Geoserver, GDAL/OGR.

We anticipate that the CWB concept will be transferable to other domain and disciplinary contexts e.g. statistics.