Summary of Research
My research has focused on scientific teams working together. When I started working for Cyber-ShARE, I quickly learned that many of our scientists had little support in sharing their data. Once they completed their research, they had in their hands data and the accompanying knowledge about their research. The question for them was how to share this information. This information was then used to publish their findings and conduct future research. If their data was made available they would find a data management center that was focused on their area of research. This poses some issues since the process is manual and rigid. They had to choose categorizations and sites that did not necessarily facilitate finding their data. In fact, one of scientists explained to me how his data is currently published at a site and he struggles to find it too. Thus, I tried to make it easier for scientists to publish their data.
In support of these findings, I built the CI-Server Framework which is a workbench for publishing scientific data and semantically annotated data from within tools that are currently used at Cyber-ShARE. The framework consists of a server in Drupal and a Java API. The Cyber-ShARE team, and in particular my advisor, have been instrumental in using the tools I have provided. Where before they were storing their data on local systems, they are now publishing their data on a CI-Server. I am working to enhance this environment so teams of scientists can collaborate and ask questions about their data. The framework has been build so that other servers can be created and additional tools can be instrumented to publish data. More information can be found about the CI-Server Framework at the CI-Server website