ODEM

Episode 1: Survey for the needs of potential users

With our first episode we wanted to get feedback from potential users from the experimental mechanics and computational engineering fields about our project idea. Therefore, we interviewed three of our colleagues: Tanja Pelzmann, Antonio Castro Moreno, and Yahya Abderrafai to get their opinion about the issues we explored in our first blogpost and to evaluate our solution..

You can listen to the episode here:

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed (copy-paste it in your favorite podcasting app): http://feeds.feedburner.com/ODEM

Content

During the episode, we asked each one of them the following questions:

  • Please introduce yourself and your research
  • Do you use experimental data in your research?
  • Did you ever need to acquire or get experimental results?
  • Did you ever need to contact someone to get their raw experimental results ? How did it go ?
  • What features should the platform have ?

We then recorded their answers and tried to get some novel insights about the project our of it.

Conclusion

  • When contacting publication authors to ask for some additional experimental data, it is difficult to contact authors and get more details about the experiment. Mostly they did not reply or did not provide the data or the contact address bounced
  • If we make a platform, a classification by experiment or material will be necessary to navigate in large amounts of data easily
  • A README with a description of the data, similar to what is done on most github repositories, should be provided explaining how the data is organized to make the data useful and usable
  • Storage of experimental data in institutions (such as a university) is still a problem, because most of the data is lost when a student leaves the institution
  • We need to provide a standardized file format for the data sets

Remarks

  • Tanja mentioned that a data management plan is obligatory for all public funded projects in Austria. It would be great when it would be necessary for all projects, but it is only necessary for some projects.

References