It’s important to consider how you’re going to organise your data before starting a project, as it can often be too late or too complex to change things afterwards.

Before talking about dissemination and open data, the implementation of good practice facilitates the research work itself, both for the individual researcher and, of course, for collaborative work.

These are mainly common sense measures.

Naming convention

Following precise and consistent naming conventions can often avoid a great deal of inconvenience. This convention should be agreed upon before the project begins.

Use names that are clear and meaningful to everyone involved in the project.
Also, avoid using names that are too long, as this would make it difficult to view the contents of the directories.
Avoid using special characters and accents in file names.
Use underscores (“_”) or hyphens (“-“) rather than spaces or dots, or capitalise each word in the name.
Dates should be formatted consistently and in an easy–to–understand way: YYYYMMDD, as this facilitates chronological sorting.
Do not differentiate between file names based on case: depending on how the files are accessed, “DATA” and “data” can represent the same thing for example.
Manage different file versions: either directly in the name, or ideally using a version manager.

Useful resources

How to name your files correctly?: on the french website Doranum.

Organisation of directories

Structuring data into directories and sub–directories is obviously necessary for good data organisation.

Note that the directory name provides information that does not need to be repeated in the file names.

Version control

A version control tool is particularly useful for files that are expected to change over the course of a project.

A version manager system records, tracks and manages multiple versions of a file. This makes it possible to:

easily return to a previous version at any time
keep a record of all modifications made over time
see who modified what and when

GRICAD has a version manager that allows you to :

service : https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/
documentation : https://gricad-doc.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/gitlab/

Metadata

Metadata is data about data. It is a type of structured information used to describe data.

When organising data, the relevant metadata is usually intrinsic to the system on which it is stored: date created, date modified, author, etc.

In addition to this basic metadata, more detailed metadata about the content of the files will be added.

Some storage systems, such as IRODS (Integrated Rule–Oriented Data System), give users the option to manage metadata (in addition to that available on the system).