Scientific data management is usually guided by a data lifecycle. Nowadays, many funding agencies ask or require data management plans. Research centers and data repositories also adopt some sort of a lifecycle. Many of the current data lifecycles suffer from the constraints they impose on their practitioners (see the abstract on ICEI2018 or the slides on Slideshare).
JenPlane is a new non-sequential, two-dimensional, flexible, and measurable data management process that can be used and customized for different disciplines, agencies, and project types. It is a visual planning and management mechanism with extensive report generation capabilities. Development is divided into iterations. At this iteration, the aim is to build a prototype of a system that supports the process in the form of a web-based and easy-for-interaction software. In summary, the system has a user interface where users can register and log in, and create organizations and projects (under organizations). Each project will be assigned to a process from the list of registered process templates. The templates may contain validation rules, restrictions, and dependencies. Therefore, the system must control all those rules and prevent (and inform) users from wrong doing. The templates are built, versioned, and maintained by a central authority and are accessible via a central repository (e.g., on Github). The processes can be modeled either in JSON or Yaml, their literals (labels) can be multi-lingual. It is desirable also, to implement a reporting function that can generate a human-readable report from the process. The front-end is desired to be built with javascript, HTML, and CSS plus either React or Angular. The choice of visual elements is up to the developer. However, only open source components are allowed. The backend would be a REST compatible application (NOde.JS or Python Flask), and the database would be MongoDB. For the registration and authentication, it is anticipated that a mechanism for Single-Sign-On will be incorporated into the application (preferred provider: ORCID). At this iteration, the issues that are assigned to milestone 1 are selected for implementation.