welcome to it short introduction to the
dataflow toolkit this video we'll go
through explaining why how and when you
can use this website when we talk about
data management and the lifecycle data
it is usually in very basic terms that
explain how data is created processed
analyzed and so on
however the life cycle of research data
is much more complex and usually
involves data spread across multiple
systems applying multiple different
processes so what may be the right
metadata to begin with may not be right
in the end in the toolkit we talked
about three turns data systems and
processes data is an abstraction for a
Data Systems and Processes
collection of files it might be a
collection of pictures video files
sensor readings or lab notes you're free
to use any abstraction that fits your
project data is always stored on some
kind of system this can be lab equipment
your laptop and network drive your inbox
and so on if you have the same data is
stored on multiple systems you will have
multiple data elements on a number of
systems last but not least we have
processes processes are the actions that
we apply to data we can create data
delete them edit them copy them and so
on processes can be on a single system
or between systems to join all this we
have a number of themes themes are
topics like security metadata and
integrity themes are common to data
processes and systems and they are used
to describe characteristics about any of
these for instance
the theme security may be used to
describe the general concept of security
for a data set it may also be used to
describe how the process of moving
data might look from a security point of
view finally we can describe how systems
handled security let us look at an
Workflows
example of a workflow for some simple
video data we start by creating some
data out in the field the data is stored
on an SD card in a video camera then we
move the data to USB hard drive and
delete it from the SD card we make a
copy turn network drive and convert the
data to another more suitable file
format in order to deposit the data to
Zener doe then we delete the data from
the network drive as we might not need
this copy any longer eventually we need
to share the data and decide to create a
copy in a commercial cloud storage
solution as the example shows what might
be thought of as one single data set
originally now has six instances of data
of which two are deleted let us look at
the steps that involve security
considerations this might be the systems
that we use for storing data like the
USB hard drive and the processes like
making sure that you delete your files
become recovery if you are working with
sensitive data if we think about
metadata we must make sure that the
correct metadata is applied when
generating the data for instance time
and date and that we generate good
metadata when we deposit the data in
sonoda these are two very different
aspects of metadata the data flow
toolkit does not have a particularly
fancy interface for trading flows so you
must grab pen and paper or a piece of
software to visualize flows and start
making your own flows you can consult
the toolkit to find inspiration on how
to make your flow and what you should be
aware of when handling data we advise
you to use the toolkit as
as possible when preparing your next
research project and that the flow you
generate is used as input for making a
good data management plan