FAIMS Mobile: Customisable Electronic Field Notebooks - Webinar
Channel: Australian Research Data Commons - ARDC
Date: 2019-09-16

Recorded 5 Sep 2019.
A/Prof Shawn Ross and Dr Brian Ballsun-Stanton, Macquarie University

FAIMS Mobile is a generalised, customisable electronic notebook for field data collection in offline or network-degraded settings. Funded by ARC, NeCTAR, and NSW grants, it is open-source and community-driven software, developed by the Field Acquired Information Management Systems (FAIMS) project.

Unlike other systems, FAIMS Mobile was designed from the beginning to support transparency, reproducibility, and data sharing in field-research domains that involve complex and diverse workflows, data models, and automation / verification requirements. Since its first production release in late 2014, FAIMS Mobile has been deployed for over 50 workflows at more than 30 projects in archaeology, geoscience, ecology, ethnography, oral history, and linguistics. Experience from these deployments has been fed back into the ‘core’ platform , and has produced a growing library of openly licensed, reusable customisation files on GitHub.

FAIMS Mobile has a unique combination of features supporting field data capture, including:

- Data and interface customisation, allowing modification and re-deployment by users.
- Collection of various data types within a single record, including structured data, geospatial data, free text, sensor-produced data, and file attachments.
- Multimedia management; image, sound, and video files can be automatically renamed based on data in associated records, and that data can be written to multimedia metadata.
- An append-only datastore allows users to review and reverse changes to records selectively.
- Unlimited devices can create, edit, and view records to sync ‘eventually’ without data loss.
- Defaults, flow logic, hierarchical vocabularies, validation, and other data collection features.
- Mobile GIS supporting raster and vector data, layer management, legacy data visualisation, and point, line, and polygon creation and editing.
- Internal and external sensor and peripheral support.
- Multilingual support using a localisation file.
- ‘Annotation’ and ‘certainty’ support marginal notes and confidence indication for records.
- Aids to good practice including contextual HTML help, selections based on images, and selection trees that can guide users through complex processes.
- Embedding of URIs into controlled vocabularies or other elements to link them to shared vocabularies, thesauri, or ontologies.
- Generation / application of globally unique persistent identifiers in the field (e.g., IGSNs).
- Customisable export to desktop software, pre-existing databases, or online data services.

Taken together, these features support the production of consistent, comprehensive datasets that are well-documented and analysis-ready upon export, and facilitate the creation of FAIR data.
This webinar will provide an introduction to FAIMS Mobile features, architecture, and use cases. We will also talk about the future of FAIMS, possible directions for development, and opportunities for collaboration.

For more information, see:
Ballsun-Stanton, B., Ross, S. A., Sobotkova, A., & Crook, P. (2018). FAIMS Mobile: Flexible, open-source software for field research. SoftwareX, 7C, 47–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2017.12.006





Slides etc available from: https://github.com/FAIMS