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Alice is an data analyst / computational scientist starting a new project. She creates a folder in her local linux home directory and populates it with a set of files (e.g. starting raw data) obtained from Bob, her biologist friend. She starts some exploratory statistical analysis in an interactive R session.
Benefits (from Justin)
Organization. Notebook for future self.
Access in multiple environments.
Ad hoc analysis - Collaborative
Initially she doesn't know when or even if she will find anything of interest, so there's probably a period of time where Synapse is not involved at all. After some time she arrives at some preliminary findings she wants to share with a biologist (Bob) she is collaborating withat least remember for her own future reference. At this point she creates a new Synapse project, and adds a local folder to it. At OS command line, she runs a command Command line interaction with Synapse might look something like:
>syn syncreate add . syn1234 -recurse = true -location = local //Where syn1234 is syn id of her project.
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Project 'AlicesProject'syn>syn add . AlicesProject - recurse = true -location = local
At this point her Synapse project is populated with a mirror of her local filesystem folder, although all the files are still living exclusively on her local file system. Synapse has some metadata on the files and folders (e.g. SHA1, timestamp and user of when they were created, maybe file size). Now, in her interactive R session she has a plot and a data frame she'd also like to add to the project as they are the start of interesting results. At R command line:
synAdd('AlicesProject/localTopFolder', aRDataframe)...
These commands save the dataframe and plot to files. Location defaults to Synapse S3 storage, so there are now two additional files in the Synapse project. As these were pushed up to S3, Synapse generates previews for the plot and dataframe files.
She switches over the the web client:
synOnWeb(aRPlot)In the project she's able to make some notes on what she's doing using the wiki tools, referencing the data frame and plot. The new project is now in her list of her recent projects.
Benefits:
- Synapse as dashboard of all her projects, regardless of where the data is living or who the collaborators are (this is likely one of many projects she is switching among)
- Wiki as notebook for future self.
- Annotations to enhance ability to later find the data / project if it goes dormant for a while.
Ad hoc analysis - Collaborative
After some time she arrives at some preliminary findings she wants to share with a biologist (Bob) she is collaborating with.
At local OS command line
syn get . -recurse = true
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