Abstract
According to the FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) principles, scientific data should always be stored with machine-readable descriptive metadata. Existing solutions to store data with metadata, such as electronic lab notebooks (ELN), are often not readily available or not sufficiently generic for arbitrary experimental or computational results.
In this work, we present the open-source echemdb toolkit for creating and handling data and metadata. The toolkit is running entirely on the file system level using a file-based approach, which can be adopted and adapted locally on the individual user’s workstation. The approach facilitates integration with other tools in a FAIR data life cycle, avoiding a complicated server setup. This also makes the toolkit more accessible to the broader audience in the research sector since no understanding of more sophisticated database technologies is required.
We showcase several aspects and applications of the toolkit: automatic annotation of raw research data with human- and machine-readable metadata, data conversion into standardised frictionless Data Packages, and an API for exploring the data. We also illustrate the creation of a web framework displaying the data using example data from the research area of energy conversion and storage. The benefits of storing data with annotations already on the file system level are discussed.