Brian,

 

We have been developing tools for collecting data of our experimental facilities, the ICAT system, which catalogues data as it is generated and stored for later release via web portal or other interfaces.  Our facilities (synchrotron and neutron sources) are working mainly in the areas of chemistry, materials and biology.  Though written in a facilities context, we would see no reason it could not be used in a university research environment. Could be a suitable tool for you. 

 

We had a paper at the 5th Digital Curation Conference in London (which concentrates on the metadata), and also at the IEEE e-Science conference in Oxford last year.

The code is on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/icatproject/

 

Hope that helps.

 

Regards

 

Brian

 

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Dr Brian Matthews

 

Group Leader, Scientific Applications Group

 

E-Science Centre, Science and Technology Facilities Council

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Chilton, Didcot, OXON, OX11 0QX, UK

tel:  +44 1235 446648

fax: +44 1235 445945

[log in to unmask]

www.e-science.stfc.ac.uk

 

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Hi everyone,

I'm looking for information on tools for managing data in the research environment for the sciences (biology, chemistry, physiology, physics, etc.). Ideally this would be a tool or toolset that facilitates saving and organizing data as it is collected/generated, with the provision for some minimal set of metadata, but well before the data set is moved to an institutional repository (IR). Most of the resources I've been able to locate are focused on IR applications, which are not optimized to the application I need.

If you are aware of any projects that might fall into this category, or if you want more details, please let me know.

Thanks,
Brian
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