Designing and Building Interactive Curation Pipelines for Natural Hazards in Engineering Data

Abstract

To design data curation pipelines within DesignSafe-CI, we gathered requirements and sought regular guidance from a group of experts in different aspects of natural hazards engineering research. Upon achieving understanding of experimental, simulation, hybrid simulation and field reconnaissance research workflows, we created four data models to guide data organization and developed specialized vocabularies as metadata. We then translated the models and metadata to interface design (front-end), and selected the infrastructure resources that would support curation and publication functions (back-end). We used iterative design and testing, including the use of interactive mockups of the GUI, to communicate and elicit feedback from the experts, and mapped real datasets to the mockups to evaluate the fitness of the data models, the clarity of the curation tasks. To address the problem of big data interfaces, we provide data representations that highlight the structure of the datasets and the possibility to browse their components in relation to provenance.