User:Steven J. Koch/Wiki Ideas/Public file system

Steve Koch 03:50, 1 September 2008 (EDT):Caleb (an ECE major and amazing guy with windows networking and other stuff in our lab) a few months ago showed my how to share files from our server on the internet via IIS (which I think means Internet Information Services) on our Windows Server. The first (and pretty much only) thing I did was to put my entire hierarchy of data from graduate school in the shared folder on our server. (You can see the hierarchy here: http://kochlab.org/files/data/Koch_Data )

Recently I've been looking at some of this data, and making links to it (in my private wiki unfortunately). I have been delighted in how easy it is to link to non-wiki files by just putting in the URL. For example, here are some links I put in my notebook today:

• file 0069 in EcoRI Close Site Popping (Word file)
• http://kochlab.org/files/data/Koch_Data/Popping%20Paper%20I/EcoRI%20Close%20Site%20Popping/020127/Converted/0068%20Seg0003-465nm-020325%2017mer%20.dat (Data file)
• http://kochlab.org/files/data/Koch_Data/Popping_VC_BsoBI/021112/Converted/0110%20Seg0008-021112%20BsoBI%2010000%20Linear.dat (Data file)

Notice there is one link to a Word file and two to data files. The Word file I linked via a renamed link (because it can open easily in Word), whereas the data files I just copied the whole URL (because more than likely I would be cutting and pasting address from the wiki page).

What does this mean? It means that if you know where a file is on a public file system, you can easily to it in a MediaWiki lab notebook via just the URL. What am I hoping? I'll try to explain:

• For all of these, it would be cool if OWW could provide a networked folder for directly saving from Windows (and other) filesystems
• Images
  • Images are commonly desired in lab notebooks. The process of saving them to the local hard rive and uploading to OWW, while straightforward, is time consuming and a significant barrier. It would save a lot of time if users could directly save to OWW via a networked folder and then link via a URL.
• Data
  • At least in our lab, lots of data sets are generated as individual files. Uploading these individually would be too difficult. We intend to directly write them to our public server (described above). But if there were some tie-in with OWW to ensure longevity, that would be even better. The disk space for us is not a problem, but the ability to promise longevity is an issue
  • Many instruments in labs are setup to dump data (gel images, spec readings, etc.) to a directory. Why not an OWW mapped folder?
  • It would be nice for publications to be able to upload an entire set of raw data, converted data, labview VIs, etc. that were used during the publication.
• Archived information
  • My above grad school data is just one sub-set of information I have buried on my hard-drive. I also have a whole hierarchy of word documents and other files that I could put in public easily via a file server like the one Caleb set up. We've discussed on OWW the possibility of mass converting Word documents etc. to wiki format, but is this really necessary for information that is useful but 8 years old?

I don't know the technical details or feasibility. What I am imagining is OWW users being able to map a network folder (e.g. an "O:\" drive) using their openwetware username (or related) and password. Users would be able to create but not change or delete data.