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Product Overview
This project was formed from three EOIs submitted to ANDS from UNSW. These were:
The UNSW Analytical Centre's Data Capture across multiple platforms project. This aims to improve data management within the Analytical Centre, which holds many of UNSW's scientific instruments. Researchers can receive training on these instruments, book time on them, and come in to the Centre to use them.
The Membrane Library or Membrane Research Environment (MemRE) project. MemRE is a system for researchers in membrane science to share and re-use experimental data and information on experimental techniques. This project aims to add features to the existing system to make it production-ready.
The Electronic Lab Notebook project. The ELN is an existing system based on using a blog-based system as a replacement for paper lab notebooks. This project aims to add automated data capture to the existing system (ie instruments 'blog' a new entry when they are used).
Users of both MemRE and the ELN make use of some Analytical Centre instruments as well as other instruments. So, one requirement is for MemRE and the ELN to be able to extract data and related metadata from the Analytical Centre's system. This is a major motivation for merging the projects.
Other known duplicated requirements between the systems:
- Exporting collection/party/service metadata to the ANDS ARDC and performing any related national infrastructure tasks (e.g. retrieving researcher identity metadata from Trove)
- Automated extraction of metadata from instrument file formats
- Large file handling and transfer
- Organisation of datasets by projects, experiments and samples.
- Automatic extraction of metadata from files exported by various instruments, such as Potentiostat, NMR and RamanStation. Displays appropriate visualisation for datasets.
- Sharing of data among collaborators and research groups by giving project access to other users on the ACData system.
- Integration with an Aperio server to sync slide scan datasets to ACData.
- Exporting collections to Research Data Australia.
- Exporting datasets to Electronic Lab Notebook and MemRE.
ACData has excellent potential for reuse. It is designed to be able to manage data from any arbitrary instruments. Its key features of data management, metadata extraction, sharing and visualisation will be useful across a range of disciplines. It provides a very advanced set of features for managing data and metadata with 'value added' features such as visualisations for known instrument types. It has a robust and flexible model for sharing data with collaborators and within research groups.
We welcome any enquiries about potential reuse and customisation of ACData.
For potential reusers, the most likely point of customisation is in adding new instruments and file types. ACData has been designed to make this as easy as possible. By updating a database table and (optionally) writing a custom parser script, any kind of instrument can be added to ACData. Refer to Adding New Instrument File Types for technical details of how to add instruments and file types.
Other features supporting reuse:
- Allows a range of ANDS handles to be specified, which ACData will use to assign unique identifiers to various records.
- Supports publishing activity/service/collection metadata to Research Data Australia.
- Supports JCAMP-DX visualisation for datasets (a common data format).
- Uses LDAP for authentication.
Other features that can be customised or turned off by potential reusers:
- Exporting metadata to MemRE and ELN.
- Syncing data from an Aperio server and an NMR FTP server.