EAGER: An Exploration in Enabling Community-Driven Collaboration

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Contemporary information technology is ever more central to science and society in the midst of the deluge of complex data. The impact on bioscience is notable, where the pace of production and the data complexity means that a large amount of data is often not adequately analyzed by the data producers, yet researchers expect rapid dissemination of such types of data. To ensure effective impact, a solution promising to be transformational is to open "big data" analysis to the broader community. An avenue is provided by modern IT and the explosive growth and democratizing impact of the Internet, which, following the digitization of information and communication, has changed the pace of information exchange and opens up new channels for disseminating data and for engaging disparate disciplines in extended, productive collaborations. The result of this will be a platform with a customized pre-build interface that will significantly reduce the downside of the form-based data input approach. The input interface will be small, easy to use and readily accepted by users but still relevant to what a user might want to input. The interface will provide strong search ability to the controlled vocabulary and provide users with this information through "input hint", dropdown lists or auto-completion, according to what is most efficient for the specific extension and provides an effective, readily followed and precise process. Sustaining the free text input section will provide users with maximum freedom of data input. By enabling community collaboration via Web access and implementing a database resource linked with the knowledge collection interface together with free text entry format, this system will provide a venue for researchers among many communities, including those located at non-research intensive universities, community colleges and minority-serving institutions, in this Nation and worldwide, to contribute their insight to experimental research observations that currently requires expensive specialized equipment only available in a few centers around the world.