California Digital Library and Partners Launch DataUp | DataONE

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-10-03

Summary:

"The University of California’s Digital Library (CDL) and its partners today launched DataUp, a free data management tool. Researchers struggling to meet new data management requirements from funders, journals and their own institutions can now use the DataUp web application and a Microsoft Excel add-in to document and archive their tabular data. 'DataUp will change the way scientists do their work, making it easy for them to manage and preserve their spreadsheet data for future use,' said Bill Michener, principal investigator for the DataONE project. Scientific datasets have immeasurable value, but they are useless without proper documentation and long-term storage. Data sharing is also strongly encouraged in the scientific community but is not the norm in many disciplines, including Earth, ecological and environmental sciences. DataUp addresses these issues. CDL partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Microsoft Research Connections, and DataONE to create the DataUp tool which is free to use and creates a direct link between researchers and data repositories. Also today, it was announced the DataUp project has been contributed to the Outercurve Foundation’s Research Accelerator Gallery. The DataUp add-in operates within a program many researchers already use: Microsoft Excel. The web application allows users to upload tabular data in either Excel format or comma-separated value (CSV) format. Both the add-in and the web application allow users to:  [1] Perform a “best practices check” to ensure data are well-formatted and organized [2]  Create standardized metadata, or a description of the data, using a wizard-style template [3]  Retrieve a unique identifier for their dataset from their data repository • Post their datasets and associated metadata to the repository. Although hundreds of data repositories are available for archiving, many scientific researchers are either unaware of their existence or do not know how to access them. One of the major outcomes of the DataUp project is the ONEShare repository, created specifically for DataUp, where users can deposit tabular data and metadata directly from the tool. An added advantage of ONEShare is its connection to the DataONE network of repositories. DataONE links existing data centers and enables users to search for data across participating repositories by using a single search interface. Data deposited into ONEShare will be indexed and made available by any DataONE user, facilitating collaboration and enabling data re-use. 'Although many tools exist for managing data, DataUp is uniquely positioned because it improves the quality and documentation of data in Microsoft Excel, the tool of choice for many researchers that would otherwise not participate in data preservation initiatives,' said Matthew Jones, Director of Informatics at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. 'Scientific synthesis will benefit tremendously from the infusion of these small but information-rich data sets from Excel into the DataONE ecosystem of shared data.' CDL envisions the future of DataUp directed by the participating community at large. Interested developers can expand on and increase the tool’s functionality to meet the needs of a broad array of researchers. Code for both the add-in and web application is open source and participation in its improvement is strongly encouraged."

Link:

http://www.dataone.org/news/california-digital-library-and-partners-launch-dataup

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.deposits oa.best_practices oa.search oa.metadata oa.standards oa.tools oa.floss oa.repositories.data oa.uc3 oa.u.california oa.microsoft oa.oneshare oa.curations oa.dataup oa.moore_foundation oa.data_one oa.rdm oa.repositories oa.announcements oa.uc.cdl

Date tagged:

10/03/2012, 14:25

Date published:

10/03/2012, 10:25