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Introduction to GIN at the University of Bristol

GIN (G-Node Infrastructure) is a free and open neuroscientific data management system developed by the German Neuroinformatics Node (G-Node). It offers a public service in the form of a research data repository that can be used to share your own research data with collaborators and/or share it with the scientific community during research output publication. GIN can also be installed locally (in-house-GIN) on a personal computer or on a local university server accessible via your institution's intranet or even made accessible publicly via an internet domain name.

The latter set up is appealing to us because it gives us:

  • an extra layer of data security which is important when dealing with sensitive data
  • a potential to develop our GIN-based data sharing platform in a way that is uniquely suited to our own needs
  • a drive for increasing data sharing and collaboration within neuroscience research groups at the University of Bristol (UoB)
  • a nudge for data standardisation.

Benefits

There is a number of benefits of using GIN in addition to a traditional way of managing your research data using a file manager software:

  • a more organised and disciplined way of working with the research data (relevant for PhDs and postdocs)
  • a data versioning system (think of Github)
  • a more secure data repository as access rights can be controlled by repository owners
  • a research collaboration platform
  • a project management system (relevant for PIs)
  • a publication repository supporting DOIs for data (when our local GIN goes online)
  • a data standardisation tool offering standard research data folder templates with automated repository sync'ing
  • a resource on good data management practices (when we create documentation).

Future directions

Currently we have GIN set up locally on one of our Linux machines (front-end) and hooked up to the university's Research Data Storage Facility (RDSF) to store the bulk data (back-end). This set up is a temporary solution useful for development and testing purposes while we are waiting for the university to allocate us a virtual machine running on a server (3-8 months queue). This is how we see our UoB Team Neuroscience Data Sharing Platform developing in the mean time and further:

  • Designing UoB GIN front page
    • Front page
    • Header, footer, and navbar
    • Help, News, About, Imprint, Contact, Terms of Use, Privacy
  • Creating documentation
    • Jupyter Book documentation for the GIN web interface
    • Documentation for GIN client (command line interface)
  • Creating tutorials
    • Tutorials for using UoB GIN: specific lab-tailored examples
    • Tutorials for recording metadata
    • Tutorials for converting electrophysiology data into the Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) format
    • Tutorials on adopting standard research data folder templates (e.g., BIDS)
  • Creating GIN services to automate repository creation and management (requires programming in GO; we are undecided on this)
  • Launching our GIN-based data sharing platform on a local server
  • Creating a Slack channel for early career researchers and PI using UoB GIN
  • Pitching the platform to other labs
  • Going online
  • Using UoB GIN as a stepping stone towards building neuroscience research database accessible via a programming interface (Python/Matlab) and supporting fast queries.

Practice

Now try out a few tutorials made to give you a basic introduction into using the GIN web interface and GIN command line tools.

Enjoy!