Difference between revisions of "Hackathon 2013/BestPractices"

Latest revision as of 11:01, 4 October 2013

What we did: Assessed other taxonomic workbenches, past and present, to try to ID reasons for success/sunsetting, and then glean best practices/things to look out for as a result.

Overall the systems that have been developed seem to fall victim to funding fall-through and shifting of focus and leadership. The systems that have survived seem to be:

• open source and free
• developed by or in coordination with practicing taxonomists
• have steady funding or support (i.e. independent of other grants or projects)
• are modular and support later changes in design and alteration (Diversity Workbench and Scratchpads in particular)
• are designed to support collaboration between multiple people (this isn't necessarily something that is required for success, though -- however it's interesting that they seem to be designed for use cases that require collaboration at a distance)
• seem to be cloud-based, though am unclear on that for a few of them
• note: couldn’t look at ITIS taxonomic workbench because of gov’t shut down.

Basic best practices and system needs from conversation with Lisa:

• must provide offline access to data (so entirely cloud based is not great)
• support rapid data entry (either through import or clear and easy support of transcription)
• should be able to search from other repositories (GenBank)
• available on one machine (again, cloud based is not great)
• must support publication workflow (thus, good reference management modules are important)
• need to be able to hook into institutional specimen databases (depending on workflow. This means that a workbench either needs to be a solution for tricky institutional database setups (e.g. idiosyncratic DBS or convoluted KE Emu set ups), or something that can work alongside them)
• for systematists, should fit into existing/common bioinformatics pipelines

Here is our working google doc: [1] And the spreadsheetized version: [2]

Members

• Andrea Thomer
• Daisie Huang
• David Eades
• Julie Allen