Maastricht University, led by the efforts of DataHub Maastricht, which provides data management services to researchers from the university and academic hospital, has joined the iRODS Consortium, the foundation that leads development and support of the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS). Maastricht is the fourth organization from the Netherlands to join the consortium, after Utrecht University, the SURF cooperative and the University of Groningen.
iRODS is free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and data virtualization used by research and business organizations around the globe. Easily deployed in an existing infrastructure, iRODS creates a unified namespace and a metadata catalog of all the data and users within the storage environment. With the iRODS rule engine framework, users can completely automate an organization’s data management policy.
“We are excited to have Maastricht University and the DataHub on board,” said Jason Coposky, Executive Director, iRODS Consortium. “They have provided the community new context regarding semantic search and have implemented an impressive new platform.”
DataHub Maastricht is still growing and currently provides data management services to approximately 185 researchers in the Maastricht University Medical Center and the life sciences faculty of Maastricht University. Managing about 115 terabytes, the organization acts as a data broker to enable researchers from multiple disciplines to reuse valuable data from the hospital, the university, and beyond. DataHub works according to the FAIR principles, which specify that data and metadata should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
“iRODS is a key component in our cross-institutional infrastructure,” said Maarten Coonen, Data Architect at DataHub. “It connects multiple systems in our architecture and provides the storage virtualization, authorization layer and flexible data management policies we need in a dynamic, constantly changing environment like academic research.”
Maastricht University, located in the southern Netherlands city of Maastricht, has 16,300 students and 4,300 employees. It is considered one of the best young universities in the world. Maastricht University Medical Center is a collaboration between the academic hospital Maastricht and the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences of Maastricht University.
The iRODS Consortium guides development and support of iRODS, along with providing production-ready iRODS distribution and iRODS professional integration services, training, and support. The consortium is administered by founding member RENCI, a research institute for applications of cyberinfrastructure located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In addition to DataHub Maastricht, current members of the iRODS Consortium include Bayer, Cloudian, Dell EMC, Data Direct Networks, IBM, Intel, MSC, the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NetApp, Quantum, RENCI, SURF, the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University College London, University of Groningen, Utrecht University, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Western Digital.
