Usefulness for development

During development of software tools which enable examination of research data, the nature of the data and its use will guide the direction of development efforts. Therefore, actual data will be used as “demo data” to prove and demonstrate the usefulness of the tools.

For rapid prototyping of tools, Jupyter Notebook serves as a sandbox to analyze the data and make decisions about automating import, cleaning, and reshaping utilities.

Furthermore, demonstrations of tool use will be on record, and part of the source code repository, which is published to the Web.

Knowledge sharing and publication

Documentation on usage as well as actual research analysis can be easily produced from Jupyter Notebook documents. Publishing documents this way on GitHub provides URLs on the Web which are useful for reference during discussion and collaboration, as well as scientific publication.

Usefulness for research

One of the goals of this project is to enable researchers to examine their data interactively. Jupyter Notebook can be an excellent place to create instructions, reports, and possibly even dashboards.

Once a notebook is uploaded to GitHub, it can be retrieved on demand, revised, and re-used. It can serve as a workbench for analysis, or a knowledge document with working examples, suitable for reproducing results. Publications can even cite references to the tools, datasets, or notebooks online, and these cited works can be easily archived.