cfaed Seminar Series

ABSTRACT:

In nearly all scientific fields, increasing amounts of data are generated nowadays.

In many cases, not only the mere quantity of data increases, but also their complexity which can be characterized by a huge variety of data formats and interconnections.

Although modern IT systems provide vast possibilities for storing, distributing, processing and analysing these data, in many setups rather simple scientific inquiries cannot be answered with sufficient quality.

One important example is the retrieval of raw or possibly preprocessed data which were used for a specific analysis included in a specific publication.

For some scientific fields, specific solutions exist, like electronic lab notebooks or laboratory inventory systems, but still fail to acquire widespread uptake.

A common obstacle is that the adaption of a new data management workflow can be very time-consuming and too heavily influence established workflows within a workgroup.

In this talk I will present concepts, workflows and a software implementation which have been developed at our Research Group Biomedical Physics in order to target these issues.

Our open-source software CaosDB implements a flexible semantic data model and provides practical tools to integrate and search high amounts of complex interconnected data. It will be shown that the semantic nature of this data management system facilitates posing complex scientific queries allowing for a more efficient and versatile data analysis.

Everybody welcome!