In September 2021, Susanne Putze successfully passed her PhD exam on "Model Based Research Data Management -Maintainable and Concurrent Management of Experimental Research Data With Domain-specific Knowledge Models"

The dissertation explores usable and practical usage of experiment model based research data management systems (ERDMSs). ERDMS base the documentation of the stored research data on domain-specific experiment models that describe the data in greater detail. Embedding an explicit experiment model into RDMSs supports researchers in describing and understanding the data stored in a system. But ERDMSs require more documentation effort from the researchers to enhance their research data with additional information. Standard data forms, like spreadsheets, are typically not sufficient to describe sophisticated, multi-step processes, such as the design of a research experiment. As such, well-designed documentation forms representing individual research workflows are essential to increase the usability of ERDMSs. However, the implementation and use of ERDMSs are major challenges. The underlying model must be initialized and maintained, which is time-consuming, expensive, and leads to high operating costs. The thesis presents new methods for structured data entry, adaptability of data documentation, data exploration, experiment model initialization, and maintenance.
The evaluation of the developed approaches occurs place in the ERDM system InfoSys, developed and operated at the University of Bremen for materials science. These evaluated methods could improve the data documentation with ERDMS significantly in terms of usability and perceived effort and thus improve its acceptance in everyday research.

Dissertation online

https://media.suub.uni-bremen.de/handle/elib/5333

We congratulate Susanne very much and are glad that she supports us also as a PostDoc our working group.