Sheer Curation of Experiments: Data, Process, Provenance

Authors

  • Mark Hedges King's College London
  • Tobias Blanke King's College London
  • Stella Fabiane King's College London
  • Gareth Knight King's College London
  • Eric Liao King's College London

Keywords:

sheer curation, provenance, data repositories, experimental data, OAI-ORE, linked data, Fedora, OPM, OPMV

Abstract

This paper describes an environment for the “sheer curation” of the experimental data of a group of researchers in the fields of biophysics and structural biology. The approach involves embedding data capture and interpretation within researchers' working practices, so that it is automatic and invisible to the researcher. The environment does not capture just the individual datasets generated by an experiment, but the entire workflow that represent the “story” of the experiment, including intermediate files and provenance metadata, so as to support the verification and reproduction of published results. As the curation environment is decoupled from the researchers’ processing environment, the provenance is inferred from a variety of domain-specific contextual information, using software that implements the knowledge and expertise of the researchers. We also present an approach to publishing the data files and their provenance according to linked data principles by using OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange) and OPMV.

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Published

2012-03-08