Data Collections Explorer

Easy findability and accessibility are important for the efficient re-use of research data. The Data Collections Explorer is an information system focussed on the engineering sciences. We want to help your search for subject specific repositories, archives, databases, and individually published datasets by answering these questions:

• Are there datasets available to support my research questions?
• Are there benchmarks available to check my results?
• Are datasets published Open Access?
• Where to publish my research datasets?
• Are there size limitations for datasets?
• Are there publication costs?

Features

• Filtering for type of resource, subject area, Open Access
• Full-text search of the entries
• Constantly updated based on community feedback

Getting Started

For local development, you need RStudio with the following packages installed:

• rmarkdown
• flexdashboard
• DT
• readr

These can be installed from within R as follows:

install.packages(c("rmarkdown", "flexdashboard", "DT", "readr"))

Docker is required If you want to serve a local instance of the Data Collections Explorer. Run the following commands to set up the container:

# This builds the container and installs the required packages
docker build -t nfdi4ing-data-collections-explorer:v1 - < Dockerfile
# Start the container
docker compose up

Once the container is up and running, it can be accessed at localhost:3838.

The R Markdown document (index.Rmd) and the CSV table to be served are located in the application directory outside the Docker container. When the Docker container is run for the first time, a directory shiny-logs is created on the same level as the application directory.

Contributions

Please make a pull request (or open an issue) if you miss a dataset, repository, database, or archive. Please provide the following information:

• Host or hosting institution(s)
• Name of the dataset or service
• Subject Area(s)
• Open Access (yes|no|partially)
• API (yes|no)
• Publication cost
• Dataset size limits
• URL
• (Optional) Comment

Thank you!

Further Information

re3data provides an overview of quality controlled repositories.

Acknowledgements

This work is being supported by NFDI4Ing (DFG project number 442146713).