Welcome to NCSA Brown Dog - A Science Driven Data Transformation Service
If you are here - you must be ready to try our newly release Beta Version of Brown Dog. If you haven't signed up and created an account, go here to create an account and get started!
http://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/
While you were there - did you see some buttons on the left?
That is a great place to begin using Brown Dog. See the button for BDFiddle? Like other "fiddle" type environments such as JSfiddle, ScalaFiddle and Python Fiddle, BDFiddle provides an easy way for non-programmers to generate and play around with metadata and code "snippets" needed to generate metadata or convert/extract data from files they submit to Brown Dog. Brown Dog provides snippets in R, Python, Matlab or generates a Jupyter Notebook for you to use when sharing your own work and documentation.
Click on that button to try it out: https://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/bdfiddle/ (you will need your user name and password to log in)
Click here for a guide on using BDFiddle: BDFiddle
What tools are available to use with Brown Dog?
See the button for BD Catalog? The Brown Dog Tools Catalog is a community resource for publishing data transformation tools and making them available for use by the scientific community. We already have a selection of tools (53 as of the beginning of July 2017) which are already available for your use. Go take a look! Click the button or follow the link here: https://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/toolscatalog/
Want to use more of the advanced features of Brown Dog directly?
The Brown Dog Command Line Interface (BD-CLI) give you an easy to use interface to Brown Dog services. It talks to various components of Brown Dog through its API. It can be used to do operations like file conversions and extractions.
Click here for a guide on using BD-CLI: BD CLI
How about integrating Brown Dog into your daily Windows use?
COMING SOON:
Do you have files that are in older formats that you are not able to open anymore? Install the Brown Dog Window Client.
You will be able to download a setup.exe from the Brown Dog webpage to install the Windows client. The client will modify your Windows file manager so you convert local files by simply right clicking on the file and a Brown Dog option will show in the selection box which will allow you to choose an output format you are able to work with.
This Windows Tool will also index/search local folders by similarly right clicking on a folder to index then search its contents based on extracted metadata.
What about some more Brown Dog related tools to use?
Click on the Download button to see an overview of a wide variety of applications can build on top of and leverage Brown Dog in order to allow you to better work with and explore difficult datasets, files, and collections. The listed clients, libraries, and applications are some of the examples the Brown Dog team has been building or supporting during the development of the project. A wide variety of applications can then build on top of and leverage these in order to allow you to better work with and explore difficult datasets, files, and collections.
https://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/downloads.html
What other NCSA components are a part of Brown Dog?
Click on the Components button to see what's included: https://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/components.html
Up Right Now?
Since this is the Beta Release for Brown Dog there will be times when services are unavailable. Click the Service Status button to see if we are Up or Down: http://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/status.html
and check out what we have been up to.
API Documentation
If you are interested in interfacing directly with Brown Dog look here for the APIs available: https://bd-api-dev.ncsa.illinois.edu/docs/
Want to get involved?
Brown Dog is extensible so new tools (extractors and converters) can be packaged and contributed by you into the Brown Dog Tools Catalog. You as a contributor will be noted in the tool and receive credit for contributions. All community members can have tools preserved for future use and get to watch as their ideas are utilized and incorporated into new concepts. And it is Open Source.
This is a quick overview on how it is done: Adding Tools
Can't get enough?
Go here to read more about Brown Dog and our goal to bring Long Tail Data into the Light - https://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/#home
Problems?
Check out our known issues page to see if others are having the same problem: Brown Dog Beta - Known Issues
Have Questions?
Go here and post it to us: https://opensource.ncsa.illinois.edu/confluence/questions/ask?title=