Methods for facilitating web-based participatory research informatics

Article history: Received 15 September 2006 Received in revised form 26 January 2007 Accepted 18 February 2007 Scientific datasets are often generated and used by “communities”, or groups of users and creators. These communities, today often virtual, can include researchers, decision-makers, and the general public; participants in these communities may contribute different components during various iterations in the data generation process, and have different needs for resulting data products. As this “participatory research informatics” model, which includes elements of collaborative research, public participation, and digital data libraries, becomes the norm, new approaches to dynamic data management will be important. Researchers commonly use theweb asamedium for research collaboration among colleagues, aswell as to disseminate results to decision-makers and the public. In addition, theweb can be used to facilitate dynamic collaboration by allowing research-in-progress to be accessed and edited bymultiple participants. Indeed, one key benefit of using the web to facilitate research projects is that data canundergo revisions and correctionswhile being displayed in some form over the web. However, it can be a challenge to keep track of multiple edits to files while maintaining the integrity of a web-interface. Here we describe a system for promoting collaboration in the creation, maintenance, and use of dynamic data over the web. Using simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheets combined with traditional relational databases to facilitate dynamic data generation and updates and maintain a data schema, we are able to facilitate efficient collaboration within and among participant communities. This approach allows for the separation of web display and content, which in turn allows participants to be responsible for their own content. This separation simplifies the interaction between those responsible for the content (researchers and other participants), those responsible for the data display (web designers), and those responsible for data management, storage, and retrieval (web programmers). The approach described here is particularly well suited to large, spatiallyspecific ecological datasets because it can be used to facilitate the “real-time” editing and display of visual data such asweb-maps, as well as to encouragemultiple participants to both contribute to and interact with “beta” data and content. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.