In late March and April,
the HCSvLab team conducted eight interviews with
researchers from a range of disciplines. This was done as a follow up to the
survey we conducted earlier in the project. The aim of the interviews was to dig
deeper and gain a better understanding of the needs of researchers in relation
to the virtual laboratory.
The needs of the future A number of researchers we We also found that theCommon Themes
users of the virtual laboratory are as diverse as the disciplines they come
from. However, the interviews uncovered some common themes. What follows is a
summary of those common themes. Accessing Corpora
spoke to are keen to get access to more publically available, well-described
data. Many researchers currently rely on the availability of corpora from
overseas sources, such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine corpus, British
National Corpus and publically available EMA (Electromagnetic Articulography) data, for their research.
majority of researchers are using data that they have collected themselves. Many
of these researchers are not able to readily share that data due to commercial
licencing or issues with privacy and consent.
Access to powerful
search functionality is high on the list of priorities for a number of
researchers. A couple of examples were provided of websites with powerful,
easy-to-use search interfaces: BYU-BNC: British National Corpus and Collins “WordBanks”.
Annotations
A convenient way of sharing
annotations with others would be valuable to a number of researchers we talked
to. Some researchers need to have multiple people annotating the same document
for quality reasons, so a way to track or co-ordinate that would also be
useful.
Tool Use and Workflows
The researchers we
talked to use a wide variety of tools and considering the virtual laboratory will
not be able to host the full range, it needs to support easy transportation of
data in and out of the tools that are available.
The researchers we spoke
to were fairly evenly split between those that want to be able to share
workflows (for collaboration or reproducibility reasons) and those that do not
have a need to share workflows. For those researchers interested in sharing
their workflow with others, it would be advantageous if the virtual laboratory
were able to host all of the tools their workflow makes use of.
Many of the researchers interviewed
make regular use of tools or scripts that they have developed themselves. These
tools are often not general enough for a wider audience and have been
specifically tailored with a particular research question in mind.
A number of researchers
interviewed are interested in taking advantage of the cloud-computing infrastructure
offered by NeCTAR via the virtual laboratory. In many
cases, the researchers require that this infrastructure not be limited to use
with just the corpora hosted by the virtual laboratory. For some researchers,
it is a requirement that, in general, they be able to use the tools offered by
the virtual laboratory with their own data.
Above and beyond
Researchers needs for
the HCS virtual laboratory vary but the common themes were:
Access to
more, well-described dataPowerful
search functionalityAbility to
share annotations with othersEasy
transportation of data in and out of tools made available in the virtual
laboratorySharing of
workflowsAccess to
cloud-computing infrastructure offered by NeCTARAbility to
use the tools and computing infrastructure offered by the virtual laboratory
with data other than that hosted by the virtual laboratory
The dialogue with
researchers continues with the HDR testing and we look forward to getting more
input and hearing more feedback from the future users of the HCSvLab.
Researcher Input by Jared Berghold is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.