User requirements elicitation study for ALPHA network data provenance documentation browsing software

The ALPHA Network (Analysing Longitudinal Population-based HIV/AIDS data on Africa) is working on a project to produce a sharable set of harmonised data that combines both population-based and clinic data from the partner studies with funding from the Wellcome Trust. Whilst community-based cohorts and demographic surveillance systems provide a rich source of data, use of the data is often limited because successful analysis requires detailed knowledge of the study's contemporary and historical procedures and of data management practices. To date the ALPHA Network has successfully extracted and harmonised 10 standard data tables from the partner studies. However, these data are still complex and require considerable prior knowledge to use effectively, which in practice means the data can only be used in collaboration with one of the ALPHA staff. This data collection contains qualitative data collected as part of scoping work to establish domain experts’ perspectives on the functionality that a user-friendly metadata browser for ALPHA datasets should provide. It contains transcripts of 10 semi-structured Skype interviews conducted with individual researchers and data managers affiliated to the ALPHA network and the Cohort & Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources (CLOSER) project. Interviews explored proposed features of the metadata browser, including: provision for viewing all tasks performed in the process of creating a dataset, browsing the steps in each task, task purpose, related concepts, related code scripts, association between a sub-task and its input data and outputs and provision for viewing data structure.

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