Labman is a research information system developed by DeustoTech at the University of Deusto to help researchers effectively manage research data. It deals with issues related to data collection, storage, linking and presentation for entities like projects, publications, people, events and organizations. More than 100 entities are involved in Labman's data model. Labman publishes research data as linked open data and allows importing publication metadata from Zotero. It also provides visualizations of the research data through interactive charts and networks. Future work will include providing a JSON-LD API and tagging pages with schema.org definitions.

1. Labman: a Research Information
System to Foster Insight
Discovery Through Visualizations
Oscar Peña del Rio, Unai Aguilera,
Aitor Almeida and Diego López de Ipiña
DeustoTech, University of Deusto

2. Motivation
• Effective handling of research related data is an ambitious goal
• Many entities interact between them within a research group
• Data availability, accessibility and trustworthiness is fundamental
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3. We had an official (joomla!-based) website
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4. … some researchers maintained their own sites
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5. … publications were curated for CVs
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6. … and funding data updated in spreadsheets
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7. Thus, we designed and implemented labman
• A research information system designed with (re)usability
in mind, dealing with the issues related to data
management and interoperability
• The key idea is to harmonize how research data is
collected, stored, linked and presented
All the project is available as OSS under GNU GPLv3
https://github.com/OscarPDR/labman_ud
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8. Data entities for a Research Information System
• Actually, more than 100 entities are involved in labman’s
data model
• Projects (also internal)
• Publications
• News
• People
• Events
• Doctoral dissertations
• Funding programs
• Organizations
• …
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OscarPDR/
labman_ud/master/docs/labman_ud_models.png
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9. Publishing as Linked Open Data
• Initially, we used D2RQ to publish data as LOD
… but control structures didn’t meet our requirements
• Instead, we extended django ORM’s save() method, in
order to control how each property was mapped
• Similar behaviours were adopted for data updates and
removals
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10. Providing reusability through vocabularies
• Some well known ontologies are used for modeling:
• SWRC (and SWRC-FE)
• FOAF
• MUTO
• BIBO
• LOD publishing is completely optional, but encouraged
for data sharing and connection purposes
• labman publishes 4-star LOD out-of-the-box, with
features to manually craft links to external datasets (5*)
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11. Management tasks: connector
• In order to ease data provision in labman, we allow
publication-related data to be imported from zotero
(zotero.org)
• We created a group library where all our publications are
kept (metadata is automatically extracted once provided
the tiniest bit of unique information), and researchers only
need to deal with tagging
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12. Researchers name’s disambiguation
Some researchers are found with different naming versions
in online publication indexing services, so we implemented
a naïve name disambiguation function using python’s difflib
module
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13. Visualising Research Data
Historical role distribution
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/people/position_distribution
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14. Visualising Research Data
Projects timeline
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/people/projects_timeline/unai-aguilera
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15. Visualising Research Data
Research topics
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/topics/projects
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16. Visualising Research Data
Place distribution in authored publications
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/publications/by_place/pablo-orduna
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17. Visualising Research Data
People collaboration networks
http://morelab.deusto.es/charts/projects/collaborations_within_group
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18. Visualising Research Data
Feel free to check many more examples at
morelab.deusto.es
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19. Conclusions & Future Work
• labman is used by our research unit’s member to deal with all the
information they manage
• Other research units have implemented it as well
research.mobility.deustotech.eu
research.transnational.deusto.es
• Whilst zotero allows for publication imports, to the best of our
knowledge we don’t know similar tools for other entities
• Providing a JSON-LD RESTful API and tagging the served HTML
with schema.org’s definitions is under serious consideration
• Also, OAI-PMH has been implemented and is ready for deploy 19

20. Thank you
Oscar Peña del Rio
oscar.pena@deusto.es