Welcome to openBIS at Empa¶
We are happy to provide you with an useful tool to manage your research data digitally, which includes safe data storage, archiving and publishing your data in a FAIR repository.
Why openBIS?¶
OpenBIS combines an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN), an Inventory Management System (LIMS) and FAIR data management in one system. A presentation about openBIS can be found here. It offers various features and can be customized to meet the researcher's needs.
- It is an open source tool that is under active develpment since 2007 by ETH and further developments account for user feedback. It is easy to implement for us at Empa and to adapt to different labs with specific requirements
- It manages scientific information and supports research data workflows from bench to publication
- Lab inventory like materials, chemicals, devices can be digitalized and combined with bar- or QR codes and ipad usage
- It supports several APIs with data programmatically. For example jupyter notebooks can be used directly in openBIS.
- Incentives for cooperation through an easy and structured sharing of data and information in an online tool
- It offers an archiving solution and also a publishing feature to the FAIR data repository Zenodo for research data stored in openBIS.
What is openBIS not designed for?¶
While openBIS offers many useful features for research data management, it's important to use it for the appropriate use cases and to evaluate other tools if openBIS doesn't support them. Specifically, openBIS does not offer the following feature natively:
- OpenBIS is not a relational (SQL) database. If you need a database as a persistence layer for your application, order one from the ICT service catalogue.
- OpenBIS is not a general data archival service. You can archive research data in openBIS via the archiving feature, but if you only need data archival for any data, consider the service offered by ICT.
- OpenBIS is not a code repository. If you need to archive and manage code, use an appropriate platform such as git. For Empa, you can use one of our GitLab instances: - public - private
- OpenBIS is not a project management tool. To manage projects, use appropriate tools like Microsoft Project, Tasks in Microsoft Teams or Jira.
- OpenBIS is not a lab resource/ instrument booking platform. To manage bookings, consider OpenIRIS or Microsoft Bookings
Note
These documentation pages is still actively being expanded and is not yet finished. We are mainly trying to collect in one place all information needed to work with openBIS at Empa with focus on Empa-specific documentation. If you do find any errors or have any comments, don't hesitate to contact us via e-mail.