Thanks to everyone for the good ideas and suggestion. Let me clarify
what I want. A simple system that does one task. I'm with James Holton
on complexity and with several others on wikis and databases. They're
simple to set up and easy to use, but no one does, besides the one who
implemented them. I've seen this with a lab wiki and a plasmid
database. If the boss just approves of the project but doesn't enforce
usage, it won't be used.
That's why what I really want is an unavoidable system. I'm thinking of
an uploader that sits on the file server. Only the uploader has write
permission. The user calls the uploader because data is only backed up
on the file server, puts the data directory name into a box and fills in
a few other boxes (four or five) because otherwise the uploader won't
work. The uploader interface could then be used to query the file
server and find datasets. But the key is that the system MUST be used
to archive data - basically like flickr, but with the tag boxes
mandatory. It's look like TARDIS (http://tardis.edu.au/) might have
such capabilities.
The discussion regarding LIMS and ISPyB and other fancy tracking systems
was fascinating, but I don't see those as relevant for my archiving
task. For the same reason, xTrack doesn't fit my bill. I want to bury
data, but not so deep that I don't find them should I ever need to. I
don't care about space group or crystallization conditions or processing
information - the CCP4_DATABASE breaks with time anyway, either because
a user renamed directories or because the user's home directory has been
moved to /oldhome to make space for new users. I just want to be able
to always find old data.
Going off on a tangent, associating a jpg of the first image (with
resolution rings) to each dataset is great. Can the generation of such
images be automated, ie. a script for the whole directory tree?
All best.
Andreas
On 18/08/2010 11:44, Eleanor Dodson wrote:
I would contact Johan Turkenburg here - he and sSam Hart have organised
the York data archive brilliantly - it is now pretty straightforward to
access any data back to ~ 1998 I think..
Eleanor
[email protected]
Andreas Förster wrote:
Dear all,
going through some previous lab member's data and trying to make sense
of it, I was wondering what kind of solutions exist to simply the
archiving and retrieval process.
In particular, what I have in mind is a web interface that allows a
user who has just returned from the synchrotron or the in-house
detector to fill in a few boxes (user, name of protein, mutant, light
source, quality of data, number of frames, status of project, etc) and
then upload his data from the USB stick, portable hard drive or remote
storage.
The database application would put the data in a safe place (some file
server that's periodically backed up) and let users browse through all
the collected data of the lab with minimal effort later.
I doesn't seem too hard to implement this, which is why I'm asking if
anyone has done so already.
Thanks.
Andreas
--
Andreas Förster, Research Associate
Paul Freemont & Xiaodong Zhang Labs
Department of Biochemistry, Imperial College London
http://www.msf.bio.ic.ac.uk
