What is depositar?

depositar — taking the term from the Portuguese/Spanish verb for to deposit — is an online repository for research data. The site data.depositar.io is built by the researchers for the researchers. You are free to deposit, discover, and reuse datasets on depositar for all your research purposes.

Your datasets

Datasets — collections of tables, maps, documents, or other data files — are fast to upload and preview. Once uploaded, datasets have permanent links for all to reference and download. You are encouraged to annotate your datasets with rich metadata so that they can be better discovered. An intuitive interface is provided to support spatiotemporal description and query for datasets. Moreover, in depositar all datasets use keywords sourced from Wikidata! Datasets on depositar are inter-connected by their semantics. They are ready to be explored and reused.

Your projects

Research is team work, and depositar is built for collaborative research! After getting accounts on depositar, researchers can form projects to share datasets among themselves. Datasets can be put under access control, so that they remain private to project members. Metadata in depositar can be collaboratively edited, and different uploads of a dataset are versioned. When it is time to release the data, there are several open licenses to choose from. Of course, data can be dedicated to the public domain too.

It's open and free!

The software for depositar is built on top of CKAN, an open source software package for publishing open data. CKAN stands for Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network. CKAN is a project from Open Knowledge Foundation, and is itself supported by a viable developer and user community. We customize and extend the CKAN codebase to better support research data management. Our extensions to CKAN are open source too. The service provided by data.depositar.io is experimental as of now. It is free for all academic use.

More about depositar

Project depositar is a work in progress. Both source code and user manual are available. Please send comments and feedbacks to data.contact AT depositar.io.

This work has been carried out in Academia Sinica, Taiwan. It has been supported by the Institute of Information Science and the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation (both at Academia Sinica), and in part by research grants from the National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan. The project started from and remains as a collaboration with the Center for GIS at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica.

Developing depositar has been a team work. The following people, in alphabetical order, have been or were once in the project team: Tyng-Ruey Chuang (project lead), Ming-Syuan Ho (project manager), Andrea Wei-Ching Huang, Cheng-Jen Lee (tech lead), Hsiung-Ming Liao, Yen-Tsen Liu, Monica Yu-Chia Mu, Huang-Sin Syu, Ally Chia-Hsun Wang (project manager), Yu-Huang Wang, and Yao-Hsien Yeh.