Towards Lensfield: data management, processing and semantic publication for vernacular e-science

Abstract

Lensfield is a desktop and filesystem-based tool designed as a “personal data management assistant” for the scientist. It combines distributed version control (DVCS), software transaction memory (STM) and linked open data (LOD) publishing to create a novel data management, processing and publication tool. The application “just looks after” these technologies for the scientist, providing simple interfaces for typical uses. It is built with Clojure and includes macros which define steps in a common workflow. Functions and Java libraries provide facilities for automatic processing of data which is ultimately published as RDF in a web application. The progress of data processing is tracked by a fine-grained data structure that can be serialized to disk, with the potential to include manual steps and programmatic interrupts in largely automated processes through seamless resumption. Flexibility in operation and minimizing barriers to adoption are major design features.