EAGER: CI PAOS: KnowLedger: An Open Digital Notebook for Research Data Management

This project focuses on creation of an open ecosystem, KnowLedger, through developing a suite of components needed for an open digital research notebook (DRN) that will nominally serve all research communities, putting the control of the development in the hands of the research community (as far as possible), promoting data science/informatics as an important part of all research activities, and encouraging research data sharing and reuse. KnowLedger is envisioned to be a complete rethink of what a research notebook should be able to do, enabling new ways to record data/take notes, connect with online resources, and flexible so it can be tailored to the needs of the science and the scientific workflow.

Giving researchers the ability within KnowLedger to develop resources they need for RDM in an open and free ecosystem is anticipated to encourage contribution to/participation in its development and garner suggestions for configuration options and functionality broadly. The ecosystem will be developed as an open and distributed model using GitHub repositories as hubs for community development of data access/data analysis modules, data templates (including minimum metadata standards), and research workflows.

The goal is to outline an approach, setup several key resources, provide ideas of how the ecosystem could be setup, and enable the research community to; understand the idea, see the future of RDM, galvanize their disciplines into action, and leverage their disciplines’ available funding for community needs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.