d-post
Device-Side Data Capture for FAIR Laboratories
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52825/ocp.v9i.3317Keywords:
FAIR Data, Data Management, Provenance, Laboratory Instruments, Data Repositories, Electronic Lab Notebooks, Battery Materials Knowledge GraphAbstract
Laboratory research often depends on heterogeneous, frequently legacy instruments that export results by “dropping files” onto Windows workstations, creating provenance and metadata gaps before data reaches electronic lab notebooks and research data management (RDM) platforms. As a remedy, we present data-post (d-post), a workstation-side ingestion layer that monitors these file drops, validates lightweight human-readable naming at the moment of emission, assembles stable record folders with captured provenance, and synchronises records to an RDM platform (e.g., Kadi4Mat) through a narrow sync connector boundary.
d-post minimises coupling by relying on filesystem events and modular device plugins that handle device-specific export patterns, stability windows, and lightweight processing. Deployed at the Battery LabFactory Braunschweig on a particle size analyser, a universal testing machine, and a scanning electron microscope, it supports workflows such as grouping related artefacts, threading series via sample stems, and managing large or composite exports with appropriate stability policies and idempotent staging. These mechanisms aim to reduce operator burden and support sample-centric traceability across research, production, and characterisation chains.
Ongoing work targets broader platform support, richer metadata and ontology alignment, and tighter ELN/RDM integration, with the longer-term aim of a central raw-data repository and lab-scale knowledge graph to support discovery, reuse, and incremental automation. The d-post source code and configuration examples are available at https://github.com/altshiftj/d-post.
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Copyright (c) 2026 James Fitz, Alexander Krause, Kashfia Mahin, Carsten Schilde
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Grant numbers 500382045