PASIG Webinar:  Policy-based Data Management

The DataNet Federation Consortium (DFC) is an NSF funded project to assemble national data cyberinfrastructure through the federation of existing data management systems. The DFC uses the iRODS data grid middleware to implement the interoperability mechanisms needed to federate heterogeneous data repositories, information catalogs, and workflow systems. The DFC provides a collaboration environment that enables researchers to share their data products and workflows, while managing both publication and preservation of research results. A specific intent is support for reproducible data-driven research.

The DFC is collaborating with the iRODS Consortium on the implementation of iRODS version 4.0. This provides a pluggable architecture for production environments, enabling the addition of new storage systems, micro-services, and authentication systems to a running system. The expectation is that data products developed in a research project will be first shared, then analyzed through processing pipelines, then published, and then preserved. At each stage, the resources used to manage the data may change, the policies used to control the environment will change, and the user community will broaden. Viable data cyberinfrastructure gracefully handles the evolution of a data collection.