The FAIMS Mobile Platform is open-source software for offline data collection on an Android device. FAIMS stands for Field Acquired Information Management Systems. The platform was established by archaeologists in 2012 to support the capture and management of digital field data in difficult terrain. It is now used by researchers from many fields in diverse situations.

A brief history of the project

In December 2019 the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) awarded a team of researchers led by Macquarie University $600,000 over three years to build a digital platform for data collection in the field and offline (read the announcement here). This was matched by $720,920 in co-investment from project partners.

This project will see the re-build of FAIMS Mobile a robust data collection tool now at the end of its digital life, making the most of current software stacks and research infrastructure. FAIMS 3.0 will accommodate diverse data capture, localisation and complex workflows, and provide seamless synchronisation, backup and version control, just like FAIMS Mobile. It will also be cross-platform (Android, iOS and Desktop) and self-serve allowing uses to customise and deploy modules through a graphic user interface (see Our Design Approach).

Why are we doing it? Fieldwork is time consuming and researchers are always looking at ways to increase efficiency in data recording in the field but that’s not the full story. We are also required to share our data in wholly reusable ways following FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. This is far more easily done when that data is born digital but creating bespoke software is expensive to build and onerous to maintain. FAIMS 3.0 will allow researchers to customise their workflows from a shared platform.

Timeline

The FAIMS project launched in June 2012, funded by the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources program. FAIMS developed a mobile, offline, multi-user collection platform for structured, free-text, geospatial, and multimedia data. The project also supported enhancements to the Heurist online data refinement and analysis service developed at the University of Sydney, and established an Australian implementation of the Digital Archaeological Record, an online data archive developed by Digital Antiquity (USA).

Between 2014 and 2016 operations were funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities grant and from 2016 to 2018 by a NSW Research Attraction and Acceleration Program (RAAP) grant. This was supplemented by consultancy income from field deployments at partner institutions.

2012
FAIMS Project launched at University of New South Wales with NeCTAR eResearch Tools grant
2014
FAIMS 1.0 released
Awarded Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities grant
Commenced LIEF grant (2014 to 2016)
2015
FAIMS moved to Macquarie University
FAIMS 2.0 released
2016
FAIMS begins operating as open-source software consultancy
Awarded NSW RAAP grant from NSW government (2016 to 2018)
FAIMS undertakes market analysis via CSIRO ON Prime
2017
FAIMS 2.5 released
2018
FAIMS wins US Bureau of Reclamation / US Geological Survey innocentive.com prize for ‘FAIMS 3.0’ proposed design
2019
Successful ARDC Platforms investment
2020
Commenced 'FAIMS 3.0 Electronic Field Notebooks' Project
2021
Alpha v0.1.0 was released (internally) in June
Beta v0.3.0 was released (internally) in December
2022
FAIMS3 0.7 was released in December

Team

The FAIMS 3.0 team works across Macquarie University, CSIRO and Aarhus.

Partners

The FAIMS 3.0 project is proudly supported by 33 individual researchers from 20 local and international organisations. For more information see Partners.

Sustainability

FAIMS has a 11-year record of successful software development, deployment, client support and community-building. The focus of FAIMS3 will be sustainability based on our CSIRO ON Prime experience, including 70+ interviews that have defined technological priorities in the proposed re-engineering. The new system will be self-service, with an open-source core supporting research transparency but value-adding services that can generate revenue to share the cost of long-term maintenance of the software.

License

FAIMS is an open-source project and all code is available through our GitHub Organisation page. The code for FAIMS 2 is under a GPLv3 license, and the code of FAIMS 3 is under an Apache 2 license with a DCO. All documentation is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.1

Users may create and share screenshots and videos of FAIMS freely. Acknowledgement is welcome with a citation or standalone statement:

‘This module was created in the FAIMS Mobile Platform v[version], https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2017.12.006.’

Privacy Policy

The FAIMS3 Project is governed by the Electronic Field Notes PTY LTD privacy policy.

  1. We have used Voyant Tools’s about page as a guide for this section. Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell, 2016. Voyant Tools. Web. http://voyant-tools.org/. ↩