LabTrove/SharePoint Connector System Andrew Milsted27th September 2011 – All Hands Meeting 2011

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The need to discuss/collaborate/record• Discuss work with other

researchers

• Collaborate with people from different sites/institutions

• The discussion needs to be recorded as part of the research record.

flickr.com/julia_manzerova

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What is LabTrove• A light weight Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN)

• Web based, using the Blog methodology

• Can be used by research groups to collaborate/discuss results.

• For open science work, the blog can publish its content to the public domain via standard protocols (Sitemaps, RSS Feeds)

• Open Source – Users can host their own instance(http://www.labtrove.org)

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What is LabTrove

Implementation of e-lab book• Users can create

links between items allowing then to create semantics

• Aim to ultimately be interpretable by machine and human

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LabTrove: beyond the blog

• Version control of content to record the full historic record.

• Metadata framework to enable effective classification of content.

• Plug-in based architecture, for easy customisation.

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Viewing LabTrove

http://www.simile-widgets.org/

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SharePoint• An Enterprise Web

Application platform

• Web content management

• Document Management

• Blogs/Wikis

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LabTrove Functionality in SharePoint • Create a LabTrove ‘Feature’ within SharePoint

• Required to re implement LabTrove.

• Only would work the case of LabTrove

• What if the was a more generic way

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Using SharePoint’s WebParts

• Scenario: Researcher has a personal SharePoint website provided by Institution and wants to publish his LabTrove lab book.

• Using the standard RSS output from LabTrove to ingest content into SharePoint

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RSS

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RSS

RSS

RSS

RSS

LabTroveConnector

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Using SharePoint’s WebPartsAdvantages• Can easily link their content to their SharePoint

instance.

• Can provide separation from LabTrove (eg for Security)Disadvantages

• Not very extendable with out of the box WebPart, into the realm of features

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DeepZoom

http://zoom.scisharp.org/?id=2

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Adding DeepZoom to SharePoint

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Integration, One Step Further - OData• Open Data Protocol (OData) is a standard data

querying protocol from Microsoft

• Part of Microsoft Open Specification Promise

• Provides integration with many tools including Excel and SharePoint

• Easy to implementation, as it is XML Atom based

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OData

Exampe: http://malaria.ourexperiment.org/odata/tcmdc_ap

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OData - Excel

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Conclusions

• SharePoint is very accessible to the common researcher

• Web Parts provides rapid rollout of features

• OData is a flexible protocol, enable effective integration of different platforms.

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Acknowledgements• Jeremy Frey• Richard Boardman• Neil O’Brien• Steve Johnston• Kenji Takeda

Questions?

LabTrove - http://www.labtrove.orgAndrew Milsted – a.j.milsted@soton.ac.uk27th September 2011 – All Hands Meeting 2011