ADC’s Re-usable Data Explorer App
Let’s take a little jaunt back to my FAIR posts. Remember that first one? R is for Reusable? Now, it’s one thing to talk about data re-usability, but it’s an entirely different thing to put this into action. Well, here at Agri-food Data Canada or ADC we like to put things into action, or think about it as “putting our money where our mouth is”. Oh my! I’m starting to sound like a billboard – but it’s TIME to show off what we’re doing!
Alrighty – data re-usability. Last time I talked about this, I mentioned the reproducibility crisis and the “fear” of people other than the primary data collector using your data. Let’s take this to the next level. I WANT to use data that has been collected by other researchers, research labs, locales, etc… But now the challenge becomes – how do I find this data? How can I determine whether I want to use it or whether it fits my research question without downloading the data and possibly running some pre-analysis, before deciding to use it or not?
ADC’s Re-usable Data Explorer App
How about our newest application? the Re-usable Data Explorer App? The premise behind this application is that research data will be stored in a data repository, we’ll use Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository for our instance. At the University of Guelph, I have been working with researchers in the Ontario Agricultural College for a few years now, to help them deposit data from papers that have already been published – check out the OAC Historical Data project. There are currently almost 1,500 files that have been deposited representing almost 60 studies. WOW! Now I want to explore what data there is and whether it is applicable to my study.
Let’s visit the Re-usable Data Explorer App and select Explore Borealis at the top of the page. You have the option to select Study Network and Data Review. Select Study Network and be WOWed. You have the option to select a department within OAC or the Historical project. I’m choosing the Historical project for the biggest impact! I also love the Authors option.
Look at how all these authors are linked, just based on the research data they deposited into the OAC historical project! Select an author to see how many papers they are involved with and see how their co-authors link to others and so on.
But ok – where’s the data? Let’s go back and select a keyword. Remember lots of files, means you need a little patience for the entire keyword network to load!! Zoom in to select your keyword of choice – I’ll select “Nitrogen”. Now you will notice that keywords needs some cleaning up and that will happen over the next few iterations of this project. Alright nitrogen appears in 4 studies – let’s select Data Review at the top. Now I need to select one of the 4 studies – I selected the Replication Data for: Long-term cover cropping suppresses foliar and fruit disease in processing tomatoes.
What do I see?
All the metadata – at the moment this comes directly from Borealis – watch for data schemas to pop up here in the future! Let’s select Data Exploration – OOOPS the data is restricted for this study – no go.
Alrighty let’s select another study: Replication Data for: G18-03 – 2018 Greens height fertility trial
Metadata – see it! Let’s try Data exploration – aha! Looking great – select a datafile – anything with a .tab ending – and you will see a listing of the raw data. Check out Data Summary and Data Visualization tabs!
Wow!! This gives me an idea of the relationship of the variables in this dataset and I can determine by browsing these different visualizations and summary statistics whether this dataset fits the needs of my current study – whether I can RE-USE this data!
Last question though – ok I’ve found a dataset I want to use – how do I access it? Easy… Go to the Study Overview tab scroll down to the DOI of the dataset. Click it or copy it into your browser and it will take you to the dataset in the data repository and you can click Access Dataset to view your download options
Data Re-use at my fingertips
Now isn’t that just great! This project came from a real use case scenario and I just LOVE what the team has created! Try it out and let us know what you think or if you run into any glitches!
I’m looking forward to the finessing that will take place over the next year or so – but for now enjoy!!
