Research Data Management System

Access all your research data with ease and harvest the fruits of truly integrated research data.

LinkAhead is a flexible open source software toolkit created specifically for the requirements of research data management. Datasets are homogenized, searchable and ready for publication. LinkAheads extensibility and open APIs allow you to break up data silos. LinkAhead provides an efficient and sustainable research data management for small research groups or even whole institutes.

Access all your research data with ease and harvest the fruits of truly integrated research data.

LinkAhead is a flexible open source software toolkit created specifically for the requirements of research data management. Datasets are homogenized, searchable and ready for publication. LinkAheads extensibility and open APIs allow you to break up data silos. LinkAhead provides an efficient and sustainable research data management for small research groups or even whole institutes.

Professional Research Data Management

...for researchers
...for group leaders
Your advantages

LinkAhead adapts to your unique setup and mix of data sources. The software can integrate Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), databases, repositories, machines or any other source that provides data in a structured manner. LinkAhead can be configured to automatically detect new and updated research data and reference it in the system. A precise versioning history and the flexibility of the underlying data model allows you to operate safely without putting your research data at risk. With your data set brought together in one place, you have new opportunities in terms of search, API access and collaboration.

FAIR data with ease
Automated data integration and efficient searchability
Agile data model adaptable at any time

LinkAhead assists small research groups to work together on shared research data sets, or is scaled to whole research institutes. A sophisticated rights management provides data sovereignity even for large numbers of users. Since LinkAhead only saves metadata and references to the original research data in the system, it easily scales to millions of entries and doesn’t care about the size of the source data. LinkAhead is an additive system that allows you to start small and grow with your research data and team.

Efficient and powerfull research data management
Sustainable solution and future-proof data
Commercial support available

LinkAhead unifies and simplifies the access to your data.
Automate tedious and error prone work employing tools like the LinkAhead Crawler or the APIs of LinkAhead.
Make your data FAIR by building on existing structures and workflows.
A powerful search language provides access not only to the data and its contents, but also makes use of interlinked data sets at any hierarchical depth.
LinkAhead simplifies the future addition or adaptation of data models to new requirements.
LinkAhead can be fully automated so that data from any machine-readable source (files, devices, user input) can be incorporated without requiring user intervention.
LinkAhead is open source and therefore future-proof. Extensions and improvements developed for one user are automatically available to all other users as well.

LinkAhead simplifies structured access to all research data and thus reduces the hurdles for current and future researcher.

Storing new kinds of data or changing the structure of existing data is easy due to the flexible, semantic data model of LinkAhead.

A powerful search language provides access not only to the data and its contents, but also to interlinked data sets at any hierarchical depth.

LinkAhead offers an intuitive data access and visualization via a user friendly web interface.

You can rely on open APIs and clients in various programming languages like Python, C, C++ and Octave/Matlab as well as ready to use toolkits for automation.

Professional Research Data Management

... for researchers

LinkAhead adapts to your unique setup and mix of data sources. The software can integrate Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), databases, repositories, machines or any other source that provides data in a structured manner. LinkAhead can be configured to automatically detect new and updated research data and reference it in the system. A precise versioning history and the flexibility of the underlying data model allows you to operate safely without putting your research data at risk. With your data set brought together in one place, you have new opportunities in terms of search, API access and collaboration.

FAIR data with ease
Automated data integration and efficient searchability
Agile data model adaptable at any time

... for group leaders

Efficient and powerfull research data management
Sustainable solution and future-proof data

Your advantages

LinkAhead unifies and simplifies the access to your data.
Automate tedious and error prone work employing tools like the LinkAhead Crawler or the APIs of LinkAhead.
Make your data FAIR by building on existing structures and workflows.
A powerful search language provides access not only to the data and its contents, but also makes use of interlinked data sets at any hierarchical depth.
LinkAhead simplifies the future addition or adaptation of data models to new requirements.
LinkAhead can be fully automated so that data from any machine-readable source (files, devices, user input) can be incorporated without requiring user intervention.
LinkAhead is open source and therefore future-proof. Extensions and improvements developed for one user are automatically available to all other users as well.

Imagine there is a place for your research data that is entirely tailored to the requirements of your research.

A typical situation: a mix of legacy table data, a file system in which data on experiments are stored in different files and file types, data from an ELN, and current data from a CSV file that continues to be updated. However, they tend to become silos or must be integrated into different research data systems with complex requirements by bandaid fixes, custom software, unmaintained versions, etc. These and other hurdles can be overcome with LinkAhead.

You want to link your CSV files with your eLabFTW experimental data? Or you want to integrate your OMERO image files into your surveys and export it to your Dataverse repository after?

All of them are popular tools to work with research data. LinkAhead already integrates third party software. This enables a wide range of opportunities to combine the data you like.

Designed by researchers for researchers.

LinkAhead is a flexible open source software toolkit created specifically for the requirements of research data management. Datasets are homogenized, searchable and ready for publication. LinkAheads extensibility and open APIs allow breaking up data silos. Thereby, LinkAhead provides an efficient and sustainable research data management for small research groups or even whole institutes.

Insights

LinkAhead - Providing a user friendly experience in research data management

The dynamic toolbox LinkAhead enables professional research data management where other approaches are too rigid and inflexible. When your requirements change, due to new circumstances, upgraded equipment or evolving needs, traditional databases are costly to adapt, if possible at all. With LinkAhead, however, these adaptations are already built in by design and easily possible whenever necessary. LinkAhead thus enables professional research data management in areas which previously could not benefit from it.

Here you can get a first impression of the graphical user interface. Convince yourself of the user friendliness and make your own first picture of LinkAhead.

Do you think about adding new machines or devices to your setup, or are you planning to use your devices in a different context? That is no problem for LinkAhead. Even if the way how your machines work together changes, LinkAhead can use the old and new data side by side.

This is a revolutionary step up from conventional databases and makes LinkAhead especially suitable for research environments.

Adapting your data model has never been easier than with LinkAhead. Creating new properties and insert them into your data model is done with a few clicks.

We also invite you to watch one of our recorded sessions on Youtube:

LinkAhead Introduction: Data Management from Acquisition to Publication

Watch this video on YouTube

LinkAhead Introduction: Data Management from Acquisition to Publication

LinkAhead: Integrating Electronic Lab Notebooks, File Servers and other Data Sources #elabftw

Watch this video on YouTube

LinkAhead: Integrating Electronic Lab Notebooks, File Servers and other Data Sources (elabFTW)

More videos are available on our Youtube channel.

Download

LinkAhead is a fully open source software package and distributed under the terms of the AGPLv3 license.

Download the latest free version and install LinkAhead on your own devices.

For installation instructions, visit the quick guide in the online documentation.

Note for versions before 0.10: For production use, the “anonymous admin” option should probably be turned off in the profile.

Documentation

The easiest way to learn how tu use LinkAhead is via the interactive tour available on this online demo. If you are looking for something in depth, please visit docs.indiscale.com, where we collect the documentation of the various components of LinkAhead. Here you can also find a more detailed installation instruction for your LinkAhead instance.

Development

You would like to contribute to the further development of LinkAhead? You have found a bug? Or you are following a certain feature?
In our Gitlab you can report bugs, ask questions, or contribute in any other way. Under the following links you will find helpful information about the code of conduct and the contributing process.

You will also find the various code repositories, such as the C++ Client, the LinkAhead Crawler, the Julia Client, the Octave Library, the Python Client, the WebUI, the LinkAhead Server, and all other repos.

Here we present a few entry friendly issues.

Short history of LinkAhead

LinkAhead goes back to the CaosDB project and was originally created under this name at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. For a while LinkAhead stood for a CaosDB distribution. In the meantime, however, both projects have merged into LinkAhead and the term CaosDB has been discarded. So if you come across CaosDB here and there, for example on the CaosDB homepage, these are leftovers. More information about the development of CaosDB and LinkAhead can be found here.

Contact & Support

Commercial support and services are available by

Write an email:

info@indiscale.com
indiscale.pgp

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