Slide support for MTSR'15

1. 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

2. 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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3. We had an official (joomla!-based) website
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4. … some researchers maintained their own sites
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5. … publications were curated for CVs
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6. … and funding data updated in spreadsheets
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7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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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11. 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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12. 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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13. Visualising Research Data
Historical role distribution
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/people/position_distribution
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14. Visualising Research Data
Projects timeline
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/people/projects_timeline/unai-aguilera
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15. Visualising Research Data
Research topics
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/topics/projects
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16. Visualising Research Data
Place distribution in authored publications
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/publications/by_place/pablo-orduna
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17. Visualising Research Data
People collaboration networks
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/projects/collaborations_within_group
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18. Visualising Research Data
Feel free to check many more examples at
morelab.deusto.es
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19. 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

20. Thank you
Oscar Peña del Rio
oscar.pena@deusto.es