Experimental materials science has different requirements when it comes to the digitalization of workflows and results compared to numerical research. While a typical PhD student uses few software, sometimes even one, experimental PhD students use on average 10 different instruments. Moreover, these instruments produce data in a variety of different proprietary binary formats. Lastly, while programming is at the heard of many numerical projects, programming is only a tangential topic in experimental projects.
Currently, experimental research flows are currently focused on files, which are transported from the instrument by various means to the central server or scientist’s desktop. Once on a local computer, the scientist analyses the data using custom and public software. The local computer is the location at which PASTA-ELN starts processing the data and metadata. It first converts the proprietary binary formats - as good as possible - into open and FAIR formats that are typically based on the NeXus file format. Then an extractor is automatically accumulating the vendor metadata, the metadata that the scientist desires as well as a graph and PASTA-ELN feeds it automatically into the database. The scientists are finally only tasked with curating the data: grading the quality and adding annotations.
This presentation shows how PASTA-ELN eases the achievement of the FAIR principles for experimental researchers by making the data more findable inside a database, more accessible and interoperable by using intermediate FAIR-file-formats and more reproducible by saving the experimental provenance in the ELN. We will present the dataflow and the relevant steps: two focus areas are the extractors and how we can easily generate FAIR and ad-hoc file formats that allow interoperability between different instruments from different vendors. These files can then be used by the domain-scientists to exchange data and collaborate across different ELNs.