SocialDendro: Aplicação de técnicas das redes sociais à gestão colaborativa de conjuntos de dados

Abstract

Advances in communication technologies have led to a lot changes in the way we deal with the various areas of information. The scientific comunity has been trying to change the paradigm of scientific publication in order to take advantage of the current ease of information sharing. The approach specified by Science 2.0 arges that information sharing should start as soon as possible, as early as the research stage, it also considers not only articles as a valid result of scientific research, but also other types of data, for example, datasets, websites and blogs. However, and in order to validate the publications, there are several steps in the scientific publishing process, including, storing of information in repositories recognized by the community, the evaluation process and finally the process of information dissemination. On the other hand, applying the principles of validation to the data types introduced by Science 2.0 is not a simple process, the main issues raised relate to information validation as well as a certain lack of copyright protection introduced by sharing information at such a early stage in the research process. Science 2.0 repositories originated as a response to the problems described, with them it is possible not only, to safely share information during the research process, but also to follow to a certain degree, the steps present in the process of a scientific publication. For instance, by using certain techniques introduced by social networks, like posting as a way of information deposit, the use of "likes" and open discussion as a way of quality assessment and sharing as information dissemination. The open-source solution Dendro already follows some of these ideas, enabling reasearchers to collaboratively storage and manage data obtained from their research. The work proposed for the thesis consists in the implementation, on the Dendro platform, of a timeline with realtime information about the changes made to a data set, for instance, adding or editing descriptors, adding or removing files and folders, comments about the changes and the use of likes and sharing. The main objective will be to improve the interaction of the researchers with Dendro, as well as applying concepts introduced by Science 2.0 and Science 2.0 Repositories.