Digital Libraries for Experimental Data: Capturing Process through Sheer Curation

摘要

This paper presents an approach to the 'sheer curation' of experimental data and processes of a group of researchers in the life sciences, which involves embedding data capture and interpretation within researchers' working practices, so that it is automatic and invisible to the researcher. The environment described does not capture just individual datasets, but the entire workflow that represents the 'story' of the experiment, including intermediate files and provenance metadata, so as to support the verification and reproduction of published results. As the curation environment is decoupled from the researchers' processing environment, a provenance graph is inferred from a variety of domain-specific contextual information as the data is generated, using software that implements the knowledge and expertise of the researchers.