Collaboration System for Multidisciplinary Research with Essential Data Analysis Toolkit Built-In

Abstract

Environmental research calls for a multidisciplinary approach, where highly specialized research teams collaborate in data analysis. Nevertheless, managing the data lifecycle and research artifacts becomes challenging because the project teams require techniques and tools tailored to their study fields. Another pain point is the unavailability of essential analysis and data representation formats for querying and interpreting the shared results. In addition, managing progress reports across the teams is demanding because they manage different platforms and systems. These concerns discourage the knowledge-sharing process and lead to researchers’ low adherence to the system. A hybrid methodology based on Design Thinking and an Agile approach enables us to understand and attend to the research process needs. As a result, a microservices-based architecture of the system, which can be deployed in cloud, hybrid, or standalone environments and adapt the computing resources according to the actual requirements with an access control system based on users and roles, enables the security and confidentiality, allowing the team’s lead to share or revoke access. Additionally, intelligent assistance is available for document searches and dataset analyses. A multidisciplinary researchers’ team that uses this system as a knowledge-sharing workspace reported an 83% acceptance.

Keywords

• data visualization
• multidimensional dataset
• fuzzy searching
• collaborative research
• t-SNE
• microservices