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@INPROCEEDINGS{Grn:892659,
author = {Grün, Sonja and Denker, Michael},
title = {{A}pproaches for improving rigor and efficiency in sharing
complex neurophysiological data},
reportid = {FZJ-2021-02245},
year = {2021},
abstract = {Sharing complex neurophysiological data, e.g. in a
collaboration or in a publication, in such a way that
theycan be understood and used is a challenge. Issues to be
solved are to define adequate metadatarepresentations to
describe the experiment, find standardized formats to store
the data, or to capture thedetails of the data preprocessing
workflows. For most of these challenges easy or generic
solutions do notyet exist that could be used “out of the
box”. Where solutions do exist, the knowledge and
expertise on howto employ them in the context of a
particular experiment is often scattered in the community.
Inconsequence, the implementation of a research data
management strategy in an experimental laboratory isoften a
balance act between ensuring a certain level of rigor,
reproducibility and documentation on the onehand, and
efficiency (in terms of time and personnel) of designing and
implementing strategies on the otherhand.Moreover, the
results of this balancing act may turn out to be
frustrating: even with comparatively highinvestment in
improving the quality of data and metadata descriptions and
data curation process, the resultwill often be disappointing
in the sense that the benefits associated with good research
data managementare not realized. This holds in particular
when a lack of standards for data formats, structures, and
commonvocabulary prevents the curated dataset to be easily
(e.g., automatically) used by other scientists, analyzedby
existing tools, or integrated into data stores. Thus,
despite the efforts, the data remain difficult to use
andcomprehend. Moreover, the solutions for data management
developed on a project-by-project basis, whilebased on
promising ideas, are rarely developed to a level of
stability and generality required forstandardization, and
tend to be lost after the project’s lifetime.To overcome
this unsatisfactory situation, we here argue for the need to
promote the level of standardizationas a community effort.
To this end, we analyze the process of data acquisition and
preprocessing ofelectrophysiological data [1,2]. This
example includes a number of aspects that tend to complicate
the datacuration process, such as a data acquisition process
that spans over multiple years of a running experiment,or
the need for collaboration across labs. We describe the
steps that we required to accomplish the goal ofcurating
data to a degree that they become sharable and publishable
in sufficient detail to ensure easy andunsupervised reuse in
data analysis workflows [3]. In this endeavor, we consider
conceptual considerationsunderlying the design of the data
acquisition and curation process and highlight the
standardizationstrategies and tools (e.g., [4-7]) that can
help in reducing the effort of handling the data. Some of
these toolsare coordinated and harmonized as part of the
EBRAINS e-infrastructure for neuroscience [8], which
iscommitted to contribute and shape a layer of interoperable
compute and data services for futureneuroscience. Likewise
we will outline the needs where complementary
standardization is still non-adequateor non-existent, and
suggest how community efforts coordinated by the NFDI-Neuro
consortium [9] couldaddress, seed, and drive towards
concrete solutions. Getting into a habit of treating the
design of datamanagement for new experiments early on in
harmony with community standards and recommendations
willgive scientists the opportunity to spend more time
analyzing the wealth of electrophysiological data
theyleverage with low-barrier collaborations, rather than
dealing with data formats and data integrity.},
month = {Mar},
date = {2021-03-22},
organization = {14th Meeting of the German
Neuroscience Society, Online (Online),
22 Mar 2021 - 30 Mar 2021},
cin = {INM-6 / INM-10 / IAS-6},
cid = {I:(DE-Juel1)INM-6-20090406 / I:(DE-Juel1)INM-10-20170113 /
I:(DE-Juel1)IAS-6-20130828},
pnm = {523 - Neuromorphic Computing and Network Dynamics
(POF4-523) / 5235 - Digitization of Neuroscience and
User-Community Building (POF4-523) / 5231 - Neuroscientific
Foundations (POF4-523) / HBP SGA3 - Human Brain Project
Specific Grant Agreement 3 (945539) / HMC - Helmholz
Metadata Collaboration $((DE-HGF)HMC_20200306)$},
pid = {G:(DE-HGF)POF4-523 / G:(DE-HGF)POF4-5235 /
G:(DE-HGF)POF4-5231 / G:(EU-Grant)945539 /
$G:(DE-HGF)HMC_20200306$},
typ = {PUB:(DE-HGF)1},
url = {https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/892659},
}