Labman: a Research Information System to Foster Insight

Discovery Through Visualizations

Oscar Peña del Rio, Unai Aguilera,Aitor Almeida and Diego López de Ipiña

DeustoTech, University of Deusto

Motivation

• Effective handling of research related data is an ambitious goal

• Many entities interact between them within a research group

• Data availability, accessibility and trustworthiness is fundamental

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We had an official (joomla!-based) website

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… some researchers maintained their own sites

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… publications were curated for CVs

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… and funding data updated in spreadsheets

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Thus, we designed and implemented labman

• A research information system designed with (re)usability in mind, dealing with the issues related to data management and interoperability

• The key idea is to harmonize how research data is collected, stored, linked and presented

All the project is available as OSS under GNU GPLv3

https://github.com/OscarPDR/labman_ud

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Data entities for a Research Information System

• Actually, more than 100 entities are involved in labman’s data model

• Projects (also internal) • Publications • News • People • Events • Doctoral dissertations • Funding programs • Organizations • …

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OscarPDR/labman_ud/master/docs/labman_ud_models.png

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Publishing as Linked Open Data

• Initially, we used D2RQ to publish data as LOD

… but control structures didn’t meet our requirements

• Instead, we extended django ORM’s save() method, in order to control how each property was mapped

• Similar behaviours were adopted for data updates and removals

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Providing reusability through vocabularies

• Some well known ontologies are used for modeling: • SWRC (and SWRC-FE) • FOAF • MUTO • BIBO

• LOD publishing is completely optional, but encouraged for data sharing and connection purposes

• labman publishes 4-star LOD out-of-the-box, with features to manually craft links to external datasets (5*)

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Management tasks: connector

• In order to ease data provision in labman, we allow publication-related data to be imported from zotero (zotero.org)

• We created a group library where all our publications are kept (metadata is automatically extracted once provided the tiniest bit of unique information), and researchers only need to deal with tagging

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Researchers name’s disambiguation

Some researchers are found with different naming versions in online publication indexing services, so we implemented a naïve name disambiguation function using python’s difflib module

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Visualising Research Data Historical role distribution

http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/people/position_distribution13

Visualising Research Data Projects timeline

http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/people/projects_timeline/unai-aguilera14

Visualising Research Data Research topics

http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/topics/projects15

Visualising Research Data Place distribution in authored publications

http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/publications/by_place/pablo-orduna16

Visualising Research Data People collaboration networks

http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/projects/collaborations_within_group17

Visualising Research Data

Feel free to check many more examples at

morelab.deusto.es

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Conclusions & Future Work

• labman is used by our research unit’s member to deal with all the information they manage

• Other research units have implemented it as well research.mobility.deustotech.eu research.transnational.deusto.es

• Whilst zotero allows for publication imports, to the best of our knowledge we don’t know similar tools for other entities

• Providing a JSON-LD RESTful API and tagging the served HTML with schema.org’s definitions is under serious consideration

• Also, OAI-PMH has been implemented and is ready for deploy 19

Thank you

Oscar Peña del Riooscar.pena@deusto.es