Standards

Standards are necessary to ensure quality and reproducibility and to support the development of more effective operating procedures (e.g., automation). Virtually all aspects of research and data processing could benefit from clear and consistent standards. In the Standards galaxy, we present our efforts towards developing such standards; these projects typically comprise specifications (i.e., text documents) and code (e.g., validators, visualization).

Vision

To support the sharing and reuse of data, to facilitate and enable the development of new tools.

Projects

L1 Data Standard for Cognitive Tests

There are increasing amounts of behavioral data freely available on the internet with metadata standards making it easier to find them. However, there are large inconsistencies in the way those datasets are structured and stored, in the way their variables are named and formatted and even in what is meant by various common terms. These inconsistencies make it unnecessarily hard to reuse datasets and prevent the development of effective software tools and automatization.

The L1 behavioral data model defines concepts and best practices regarding the naming and structuring as well as coherent data models for cognitive tests.

L1 standard website

L1 Data Standard for Questionnaires

Questionnaires are perhaps the most commonly used tool to collect data in social sciences. And while much work has gone into improving the design of questionnaires, comparatively little effort has gone in defining how data collected via questionnaires should be structured, stored and shared. In this standard we propose to organize questionnaire response data in a way that is consistent with the L1 behavioral test data standard but very different from the way such data is typically structured in publicly available datasets.

L1 standard website

Events Data Standard

version 0

We developed a standard for structuring event data across cognitive tests, questionnaires, and video games. We will likely iterate over this standard or adopt existing standards before sharing it publicly.

StudyFlow Standard

prototype

Currently, the procedures in behavioral experimental studies are described as text in research papers. We propose to extend BPMN to formally describe experimental procedures (i.e., the flow of participants across activities within a study). This ensures completeness and consistency, and supports the development of new software tools (e.g., for visualizing studies or analyzing data).

Specification

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