Research Data Management

in practice

Ronny Gey
ronny.gey@ufz.de

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ

February 3, 2025

Me

  • Dipl. Business Informatics/ MA Library and Information Science
  • 0000-0003-1028-1670
  • RDM group UFZ
  • Consulting in RDM and research software development and usage

UFZ and RDM

  • Helmholtz Association
    • 18 Centres
    • 43.000 Employees
  • Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Formerly in German: Umweltforschungszentrum)
  • RDM
    • Associated to Department of Monitoring/Exploration Technologies and IT
    • 20 employees
    • 3 Teams:
      • Service, Consulting and Education
      • Information Technologies
      • Data Pipelines and Processing
  • We are always looking for IT and data loving student workers

RDM Dev

Data Management Portal (DMP)

SaQC - Software as Quality Control

  • Python module and a standalone command line application
  • Integrated framework to quality control timeseries data
  • Collection of methods/algorithms to analyse, process and annotate timeseries data

SaQC - Software as Quality Control

SaQC - Software as Quality Control

  • Processing
    • Resampling, Interpolation
    • Smoothing, data products
  • Quality Control
    • Basic: constants-, breaks-, outlier-detection
    • Advanced: noise-, drift-, pattern-detection
    • Generic: formulate cross variable conditions

Sensor Management System (SMS)

Sensor Management System (SMS)

The Sensor Management System is a web-based software that allows users to collect and provide metadata about sensors and platforms. Furthermore, the SMS allows to documentand plan the usage context of a sensor, e.g. time period and location of a measurement, the configuration together with other sensors as well as platforms, but also the activities performed on the sensor like sensor calibration, firmware update and much more.

  • Joint development in the HUB Terra (GFZ, UFZ, FZJ)
  • Productive SMS instances at UFZ & GFZ
  • Linking of metadata with the data streams for observatories

RDM Deploy/Services

Data Management Portal

Wombat

  • WebApps Organized by a MOdular Built Architecture
  • based on GitLab and Docker

eLabFTW

ChaSaM (tbd)

  • Chemical Sample Management

RDM Trainings 2024/25

https://rdm.pages.ufz.de/guidelines/training/

RDM Documentation

https://rdm.pages.ufz.de/guidelines/

RDM Consulting

  • Wombat: deploy WebApps
  • DMP: Configuration, Upload, Archive, DOI
  • Data/Software: Licensing issues, FAIR
  • Data Management Plans
  • Find the right storage solution (years end phenomenom)

RDM Consulting - Examples

„Last year I took one of the basic data management courses offered by your unit. During the course, you mentioned that you are coming from the social sciences, reason why I am contacting you. Within our department we have been discussing the need to more consciously update or incorporate data management into our work. I was wondering if you could offer a very short training/overview more oriented to social science needs or there is some material you could share with me to provide an overview to the department.“

  • training
  • domain specific

RDM Consulting - Examples

„I am working on a grant proposal and want to make a data management plan and was told that it would be a good idea to contact you about this. I was wondering if there are any templates that are used for this, or maybe some general guidelines to follow?“

  • grant proposal
  • guidelines and templates for a DMP

RDM Consulting - Examples

„We have a question about licenses and Github. We are considering to use GitHub to publish some sample data and R script (which also contains the use of all the open source packages and functions therein) for the purpose of it being available to be used and modified by others, but we are not sure what license to use. Have you perhaps come across this before, is there a default license used by the UFZ for this type of publication?“

  • licensing for data and software

RDM Board and Policy Work

RDM Dissemination and Outreach

  • Department visits
  • Presentations at HIGRADE, Science Days, SaxFDM, Conferences, Uni LE (today)

RDM Infrastructures

HIFIS - Helmholtz Federated IT Services

NFDI4Earth

EOSC - European Open Science Cloud

RDM Tools

Fuji

RDMO - Research Data Management Organiser

SQAaaS - Software Quality Assessment as a Service

FAIR-python-cookiecutter

RDM Consultant?

Final take: What it takes to be a RDM consultant?

  • Science and IT: You’re in between two complex ecosystems
  • Communication is key
  • High degree of freedom and flexibility
  • Learn a lot about different sciences & projects…
  • …but you re not ‘allowed’ to dive into!

Q&A

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