raid-tools: Automating Provenance Tracking with RAiDs

At Naturalis Biodiversity Center, we deal with a wide variety of research activities: analyses of genomic sequences, studies of physical collection specimens, and images from biomonitoring cameras, to name a few. In turn, those activities produce all sorts of data and involve different people, equipment, and software tools, possibly from different projects and institutions. In a pilot study, we started exploring how Research Activity Identifiers (RAiDs) can help in linking all those elements together, and started playing with the idea of integrating RAiD API calls within our applications. Now, we are continuing that thread of thought and looking into developing a basic toolkit to integrate RAiDs within our research activities, and wondering what that looks like... A command-line interface to include RAiD API calls in Bash scripts? A Python module to link bioinformatics workflows to RAiDs? We'd like to gather feedback from the community!