Introduction

Your scientific institute or working group creates lots of samples, and your team needs a tool to keep track of them? JuliaBase is made for exactly that! It is a database solution for samples, their processing and their characterization, with the following features:

  • intuitive browser-based interface, fully working even on mobile devices

  • maximal flexibility for being adapted perfectly to your production and measurement setups, and to your workflows

  • possibility to manage more than one department in a single database

  • fine-grained access control

  • connects to your LDAP server for user management

  • keeps track of samples across sample splits

  • support for pre-evaluating raw data and creating plots

  • automatic notification of changes in your samples

  • sample management by sample series, topics, and tags

  • arbitrarily complex searches made easy, e.g. “find all samples with infrared measurements, deposited together with a sample on glass substrate with a conductivity greater than \(10^{-6}\) S/cm; oh yes, and only from this year and made by John”

  • export to spreadsheets

  • automatic lab notebooks

  • database interaction from own programs, e.g. for connecting your measurement setup directly to the database

  • fully translatable; core is available in English and German so far

  • fully brandable; adjust the look to your corporate identity and/or your taste

  • mature codebase

  • compliance with state-of-the-art Web standards and security considerations

  • fully open source

We believe that the database should adapt to the people and the existing workflows rather than the other way round!

However, there is no free lunch … JuliaBase’s flexibility comes at a cost. You have to create the Python code to describe your setups and apparatuses. Leaving out fancy things, this is copy, paste, and modify of < 100 lines of code for each apparatus. JuliaBase contains code for typical processing and measurement setups that you can use as a starting point.

Contact

See The JuliaBase project for how to find the right contact person and how to get in touch with the JuliaBase community.

See also the impressum of JuliaBase’s website.

Technical overview

For better evaluation, here is a short list of the technical aspects of JuliaBase:

  • JuliaBase is built on top of the Django web framework.

  • JuliaBase is written 100% in the Python programming language.

  • Although other setups are possible, the easiest server installation bases on Linux, PostgreSQL, and Apache.

  • Hardware requirements are very low; a 100 people institute could be served by a single ordinary desktop computer.

Public releases

You can download JuliaBase from GitHub as .tar.gz or zip files. Alternatively, you may visit the current state of the source code repository there.

Getting started

If you want to give JuliaBase a try, visit the demo site. If you like it, the next step could be installing it. Its installation includes the demo site, so you have immediately something up and running, and you can evaluate it even better.

If you consider actually using JuliaBase, have a look at the full table of contents. This documentation also exists in PDF format.