SeedMe: Data Sharing Building Blocks

Amit Chourasia, David R. Nadeau, & Michael L. Norman

Published August 11, 2017, SCEC Contribution #7496, 2017 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #305 (PDF)

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Data sharing is essential and pervasive in scientific research. The requirements for data sharing vary as research projects mature and iterate through early designs and prototypes with a small number of collaborators, and develop into publishable results and larger collaborator teams. Along the way, preliminary and transient results often need to be shared, discussed, and visualized with a quick turn-around time in order to guide the next steps of the project. Data sharing throughout this process requires that the data itself be shared, along with essential context, such as descriptions, provenance, scripts, visualizations, and threaded discussions. However, current consumer-oriented data sharing solutions mainly rely on local or cloud file systems or web-based drop boxes. These mechanisms are rather basic and are largely focused on data storage for individual use, rather than data collaboration. Using them for scientific data sharing is cumbersome.

SeedMe is a platform that enables easy sharing of transient and preliminary data for a broad research computing community by offering cyberinfrastructure as a service and a modular software stack that could be customized. SeedMe is based on Drupal content management system as a set of building blocks with additional PHP modules and web services clients.

In this poster we present our progress on implementing a web based modular data sharing platform that collocates shared data, along with the data’s context, including descriptions, discussion, light-weight visualizations, and support files. This project is an evolution of the earlier SeedMe[1, 2] project, which created prototype data sharing tools and garnered user feedback from real-world use. The new SeedMe platform is developing modular components for data sharing, light-weight visualization, collaboration, DOI registration, video encoding and playback, REST APIs, command-line data import/export tools, and more. These modules may be added to any web site based upon the widely-used open-source Drupal content management system. Demonstration of project is available as a sample website[3].



[1] SeedMe. 2016. SeedMe (Stream Encode, Explore and Disseminate My Experiments) Retrieved Jun 1, 2017 from https://www.seedme.org
[2] Chourasia, A., Wong, M., Mishin, D., Nadeau, D., and Norman, M. SeedMe: A scientific data sharing and collaboration platform, in XSEDE 2016, (Miami, FL, 2016). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2949550.2949590
[3] Demo for SeedMe. 2017. Retrieved Jun 15, 2017 from https://demo.seedme.org

Citation
Chourasia, A., Nadeau, D. R., & Norman, M. L. (2017, 08). SeedMe: Data Sharing Building Blocks. Poster Presentation at 2017 SCEC Annual Meeting.


Related Projects & Working Groups
Communication, Education, and Outreach (CEO)