Introducing Lark

Accelerated Research

From the laboratory bench to the library shelves, data is driving modern research. These data, and the experiments which generate them, have become increasingly complex, difficult to work with, collaborate on, publish, remix and reuse.

Lark is software that aims to make these things easy. It's in development now.

Lark is a framework for research

Lark is a simple framework for describing experiments, hypotheses, materials and methods relating to research, supporting everything from laboratory protocols to computational workflows. Lark promotes best practice and experimental organisation without getting in the way. With a focus on investigator productivity, Lark aims to accelerate research while keeping things simple, fast and fun.

Lark’s framework encapsulates experimental data and workflows into a single, distributable 'kernel' of research. This kernel can be used to reproduce results during peer review, or used by others to embrace your research, adding impact.

Lark is a platform for research

Great research comes from standing on the shoulders of other great research, but sharing, citing and maintaining today's research data is a challenge. Lark hosts all the materials, methods and results for an application in a way that can be easily reused, reviewed and remixed. Audit trails, dependencies and provenance are captured and can be shared between collaborators, making it easy for others to evaluate and extend experiments whilst adding impact to existing and novel research.

Lark’s platform manages experimental services and data, versions, digitally signs and verifies research workflows, maintains published applications and exposes a powerful grid for high performance computation.

The Lark platform can be hosted by individual teams, within institutions or by other service providers. Extra features (such as data mining, indexing, metrics) can be added through simple plug-ins.

Lark is in development

Lark is an ambitious project which is currently under construction. If you have a workflow which you think would benefit from these approaches, please let us know. You can also follow along by joining the mailing lists, reading the blog or via Twitter.