Hello
Is there an online log book which can be used by a team of people analysing a data set to store details of the pipelines performed (commands, software version) on a set of data. I forever seem to be asking colleagues of how they generated the data they hand me and it seems more than prudent to be logging this somewhere in a centralised resource. There is a wiki but I think the informality of this resource means people aren't strict about its use.
thank you for your time
edit: i should point out that the members of this team are very dispersed geographical so a notebook is out of the question and even access to a shared machine space is unlikely as we are all from different institutions. I was thinking of an online log more formal than a wiki.
Strict is a loose term. A convention could be as simple as "document what you did" so that a reasonable person doesn't have to spend valuable time doing forensic bioinformatics to reverse engineer a directory full of results just to make sure they understand how they were derived. Most bioinformaticians I work with document nothing. If you're working as part of a group, conventions are important. Exactly how they are spelled out is less important than doing nothing and leaving problems. If people can't understand what you did, it doesn't count. (BTW, I too use MoinMoin)
You're right, all should document what they did, for their own good, to re-use their own protocols. Documenting everything for others would take too much time, though. And you cannot know which of your protocols will be any useful for others. As solution, other people from your group should more or less know what you do and what tools you use, and then if they need sth, they ask, and if you can help, you send them the protocol adding the explanations.