Labman: a Research Information System to Foster Insight
Discovery Through Visualizations
Oscar Peña del Rio, Unai Aguilera,Aitor Almeida and Diego López de Ipiña
DeustoTech, University of Deusto
Motivation
• Effective handling of research related data is an ambitious goal
• Many entities interact between them within a research group
• Data availability, accessibility and trustworthiness is fundamental
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Thus, we designed and implemented labman
• A research information system designed with (re)usability in mind, dealing with the issues related to data management and interoperability
• The key idea is to harmonize how research data is collected, stored, linked and presented
All the project is available as OSS under GNU GPLv3
https://github.com/OscarPDR/labman_ud
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Data entities for a Research Information System
• Actually, more than 100 entities are involved in labman’s data model
• Projects (also internal) • Publications • News • People • Events • Doctoral dissertations • Funding programs • Organizations • …
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OscarPDR/labman_ud/master/docs/labman_ud_models.png
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Publishing as Linked Open Data
• Initially, we used D2RQ to publish data as LOD
… but control structures didn’t meet our requirements
• Instead, we extended django ORM’s save() method, in order to control how each property was mapped
• Similar behaviours were adopted for data updates and removals
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Providing reusability through vocabularies
• Some well known ontologies are used for modeling: • SWRC (and SWRC-FE) • FOAF • MUTO • BIBO
• LOD publishing is completely optional, but encouraged for data sharing and connection purposes
• labman publishes 4-star LOD out-of-the-box, with features to manually craft links to external datasets (5*)
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Management tasks: connector
• In order to ease data provision in labman, we allow publication-related data to be imported from zotero (zotero.org)
• We created a group library where all our publications are kept (metadata is automatically extracted once provided the tiniest bit of unique information), and researchers only need to deal with tagging
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Researchers name’s disambiguation
Some researchers are found with different naming versions in online publication indexing services, so we implemented a naïve name disambiguation function using python’s difflib module
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Visualising Research Data Historical role distribution
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/people/position_distribution13
Visualising Research Data Projects timeline
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/people/projects_timeline/unai-aguilera14
Visualising Research Data Research topics
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/topics/projects15
Visualising Research Data Place distribution in authored publications
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/publications/by_place/pablo-orduna16
Visualising Research Data People collaboration networks
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/projects/collaborations_within_group17
Visualising Research Data
Feel free to check many more examples at
morelab.deusto.es
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Conclusions & Future Work
• labman is used by our research unit’s member to deal with all the information they manage
• Other research units have implemented it as well research.mobility.deustotech.eu research.transnational.deusto.es
• Whilst zotero allows for publication imports, to the best of our knowledge we don’t know similar tools for other entities
• Providing a JSON-LD RESTful API and tagging the served HTML with schema.org’s definitions is under serious consideration
• Also, OAI-PMH has been implemented and is ready for deploy 19