A recently awarded US NSF grant, ‘KnowLedger: An Open Digital Notebook for Research Data Management‘ seeks to develop an open source digital notebook infrastructure that can support disciplines across science. More details about the grant can be found at https://chalklab.github.io/
The project is a high risk/high reward grant due to the broad application of the concept and the need to bring together experts across disciplines to develop an infrastructure for the major components of the system, that include for example:
- a framework for (local) activity tracking (logging the research workflow)
- a framework for data governance (defining how we look after our data)
- a framework for user profiles (sharing expertise across the Knowledge ecosystem)
- a framework for module development (enabling flexible functionality/design in KnowLedger)
- a framework for workflow implementation (allowing improved research reproducibility)
- a framework for collaboration (creating research communities within KnowLedger)
- a framework for education and training (teaching future scientists with real data)
- a framework for community engagement (enabling outreach to understand researcher needs)
- a framework for accessibility (making science accessible to all)
- a framework for collecting related software, tools, ontologies, specifications etc. (integratable module components)
The open source application ‘KnowLedger’ built in this project will be developed in Python and made available for free via GitHub. Data captured in KnowLedger will be stored in the SciData framework format using JSON-LD (a semantic data encoding).
This project supports FAIR data, open science, open source software, minimal metadata standards for science, and is aligned with many activities in CODATA, including CDIF, DRUM, and FAIR Vocabularies.
Please considered contributing to this project in one of the areas above or through KnowLedger code development.
For additional information please contact Dr. Stuart Chalk at schalk@unf.edu.