Data is an integral part of scientific research. With a rapid growth in data collection and generation capability and an increasingly collaborative nature of research activities, data management and data sharing have become central and key to accomplishing research goals. Researchers today have variety of solutions at their disposal from local storage to Cloud based storage. However, most of these solutions focus on hierarchical file and folder organization. While such an organization is pervasively used and quite useful, it relegates information about the context of the data such as description and collaborative notes about the data to external systems. This spread of information into different silos impedes the flow research activities.
In this tutorial, we will introduce and provide hands on experience with the SeedMeLab platform, which provides a web-based data management and data sharing cyberinfrastructure. SeedMeLab enables research groups to manage, share, search, visualize, and present their data in a web-based environment using an access-controlled, branded, and customizable website they own and control. It supports storing and viewing data in a familiar tree hierarchy, but also supports formatted annotations, lightweight visualizations, and threaded comments on any file/folder. The system can be easily extended and customized to support metadata, job parameters, and other domain and project-specific contextual items. The software is open source and available as an extension to the popular Drupal content management system.
For more information visit:
http://SeedMeLab.org
