A former student of mine, Alexey Zaitsev, works in biomedical research and is interested in building
a data library for managing scientific data, e.g.:
Storing virtually any kind of data structure - text, images, binary blobs, ...
Providing metadata that describes each part of the data.
Enforcing policies for capturing information that can be interpreted and retrieved on demand.
Enabling the safe storage of massive collections of these ensembles for future scrutiny.
Providing mechanisms that are platform independent.
Alexey's goal is to support replication of experiments and published research that depends on
the interpretation of experimental data.
Replication Crisis:
"Because the reproducibility of experiments is an essential part of the scientific method,[...]
the inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields
of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work.
The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology
(and in particular, social psychology) and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to
re-investigate classic results, and to attempt to determine both the reliability of the results, and,
if found to be unreliable, the reasons for the failure of replication.[...]" - Wikipedia,
Replication Crisis.
∞ Data Library Story
This story is an abstraction of Alexey's work. He has prototype implementations and will be
publishing those soon, in a forum similar to this. He will be seeking collaborators for what will
be a large, long-term effort. When he is ready, I will post information in this page about how to reach
him.
Jim Fawcett
[...] indicates footnotes that have been elided, but can be found in the
Wikipedia article cited.
