Exploiting Views for Collaborative Research Data Management of Structured Data.

Data-driven analysis plays a vital role in research projects, and sharing data with collaborators inside or outside a project is supposed to be daily scientific work. There are various tools for research data management, which offer features like storing data, meta-data indexing, and provide options to share data. However, currently, none of them offers capabilities for sharing data in different levels of detail without excessive data duplication. Naturally, sharing data by duplication is a tedious process, as preparing data for sharing typically involves changing temporal resolution (i.e., aggregation) or anonymization, e.g., to ensure privacy. In this paper, instead of re-inventing the wheel, we ask whether the concept of views, a well-established concept in relational databases, fulfills the above requirement. Conducting a case study for a project employing sharing of learning analytics data, we propose a framework that allows for fine-granular configuration of shared content based on the concept of views. In the case study, we a) analyze a data reuse scenario based on the FAIR principles, b) suggest a concept for using views for data sharing, and c) demonstrate its feasibility with a proof-of-concept.