Welcome to the KnowLedger Project#
This website describes the upcoming NSF funded project “KnowLedger: An Open Digital Notebook for Research Data Management”, a project to develop an open research notebook for the scientific community (2025-2026). The project was developed out of a decade of research on the idea that an open, digital notebook is needed across many research communities. Combined with the movement toward open science, and the advent and interest in the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, technologically all the pieces of this complicated puzzle are now available. The focus of this project then is to pull them together into a single (but configurable) system.
Given the scope of this project it is important that the project put researchers first, creating a system that allows researchers to build an instance of KnowLedger that fits their needs, workflows, and requirements for data storage, security, and openness. The project is thus based on the following observations of the research enterprise:
Researchers need tailored solutions that fit their workflows and enable research progress
The cost of such solutions should be as cheap as possible and preferably free
Any solution needs to ensure trust in the integrity of the stored data…
…and give a researcher (or the group PI) complete control of how, when and if data is made open
The research community must be integral to the development of any such RDM system
The last point is especially important because the project team cannot anticipate what each researcher needs, so the research community must be involved in the project and drive the tools, resources, data models, data format, that can be used/written/accessed in the system. The project therefore invites anyone in the research community to get involved so the project knows what it needs to support at the system level.
More information about the KnowLedger implementation/development is available on left, as are opportunities where you can get involved, and how you can link your project to the KnowLedger project.
Stuart Chalk, KnowLedger Project PI • schalk@unf.edu • ORCID