Generating metadata for an experiment: using a tablet ELN

Abstract

The drive towards more transparency in research and open data increases the importance of being able to find information and make links to the data. Metadata is an essential ingredient for facilitating this discovery. We have discovered from our analysis of metadata usage in the LabTrove ELN that many users do not use metadata effectively and in many cases do not understand what it is or why it is useful. LabTrove provides a flexible metadata framework, enabling the creation of two different kinds of user-defined metadata: Sections used to describe the content of the entries, and key-value pair data useful for describing specific elements of the experiment. When we developed a prototype tablet ELN called Notelus, able to integrate with LabTrove, we wanted to ensure that we could make the best use of the metadata capabilities of LabTrove by providing the users with the opportunity to add useful metadata simply and easily. Part of the decision making process for the development of Notelus was defining structures to represent an experiment and an associated plan based upon our experiences of how researchers planned, recorded, and organized their experiment data. Metadata is then automatically generated based on information provided by the user about the experiment and from the experiment plan if one is used in addition to basic metadata, such as author, date and time of creation, and name of the notebook. The result is metadata associated with the experiment record in LabTrove that represent the kinds of information that researchers use and search for, but including information that they have typically not considered used when they have created their own metadata manually.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Cerys Willoughby: orcid.org/0000-0003-1721-9212

ORCID for Jeremy G. Frey: orcid.org/0000-0003-0842-4302

ORCID for Simon J. Coles: orcid.org/0000-0001-8414-9272

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