Reagan Moore, Ph.D., the principal investigator for the consortium, director of the DICE Center, SILS professor and domain scientist for data management at RENCI.

CHAPEL HILL, NC, Sept. 28, 2011–The National Science Foundation has funded the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to lead a multi-institutional team that will build and deploy a prototype national data management infrastructure that addresses some of the key data challenges facing scientific researchers in the digital age.

The infrastructure will support collaborative multidisciplinary research through shared collections, data publication within digital libraries and reference collections within persistent archives.

The NSF awarded nearly $8 million over five years to the DataNet Federation Consortium (DFC), a group that spans seven universities. The DFC will address the data management needs of six science and engineering disciplines: oceanography, hydrology, engineering design, plant biology, cognitive science, and social science. About half the award will support research and development at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) research group in UNC’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS) leads the consortium and RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill)  is responsible for  federating the consortium’s diverse data repositories to enable cross-disciplinary research. Federating data involves building a common name space for identifying files, providing a context for file meaning and relevance, providing a common access interface, and developing management policies across the distributed collection.

The DFC will use iRODS, the integrated Rule Oriented Data System, to implement a policy-based data management infrastructure. iRODS, developed by UNC’s DICE Center and DICE researchers at the University of California at San Diego, enforces policies as computer actionable rules to organize distributed data into sharable collections.  Procedures to automate data management functions are cast as computer executable workflows.  Policies control data access, sharing and archiving. Research groups worldwide, including the NASA Center for Climate Simulations, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the Australian Research Collaboration Service, and the Texas Digital Libraries, use iRODS technology to manage their research data grids, implement digital libraries, and build persistent archives.

“Excelling in the digital age requires that scientific disciplines and government agencies have the ability to manage the enormous amount of data that are generated each day,” said UNC-Chapel Hill Vice Chancellor for Research Barbara Entwisle. “Scientists can only solve the important problems of our times if they can easily access, share, analyze, and preserve data for future researchers and students. This award is important beyond its dollar amount because it establishes Carolina as the leader in the worldwide research community in taming the data deluge and as the data federation hub for collaborative research. It’s a role that is essential for future discoveries and innovations.”

Experts in the DICE group and at RENCI will work with six NSF-supported national consortia to federate their distributed data repositories and create policies for retention, distribution, access and validation of critical data properties. Those communities are:

• The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), an NSF-funded program led by the University of California at San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. The OOI researchers use data from environmental sensors to study the physical, chemical, geological and biological variables in the ocean and seafloor.
• The Consortium of Universities for Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.  (CUAHSI) an organization led by the University of South Carolina. CUAHSI includes more than 130 partner organizations, including UNC’s Institute for the Environment, working to advance water science.
• CIBER-U, the Cyber-Infrastructure-Based Engineering Repositories for Undergraduates, an initiative led by Drexel University, which uses digital design repositories to enhance engineering instruction and learning.
• The iPlant Collaborative, a community of researchers and students led by the University of Arizona that is developing an integrated cyberinfrastructure to advance studies of plant biology.
• The Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, an interdisciplinary institute at UNC-Chapel Hill that focuses on teaching and research in the social sciences.
• The Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC), an NSF Science of Learning Center based at the University of California at San Diego that studies the role of time and timing in learning in order to improve educational practices.

Arizona State University researchers will participate in the DFC by collaborating on policy-based data management systems and Duke University researchers will collaborate on education and outreach initiatives to broaden the impact of the DFC.

“The data we will work with includes observational data from sensors, experimental and simulation data, engineering designs and both structured and unstructured data,” said Reagan Moore, Ph.D., the principal investigator for the consortium, director of the DICE Center, SILS professor and domain scientist for data management at RENCI.  “The infrastructure we develop will address all stages in the community-based data collection lifecycle, from initial collection formation for a single project, to shared collections across institutions, to formation of data processing pipelines, to publication and long term preservation. We see this as the first step to building a data infrastructure that will accommodate collaborative research, new educational approaches and innovative problem solving in academic institutions, in federal agencies and across national boundaries.”

During the first 18 months of the grant, the consortium will focus on federating the data management cyberinfrastructure for the OOI, CUASHI and CIBER-U. The work will include identifying federation requirements, integrating existing data management systems, deploying a federation hub, and developing policies and procedures for data sharing so that the data collections of these research communities can become the foundation of a national data cyberinfrastructure.

For more information:

iRODS website

DICE Center website

SILS website

CHAPEL HILL, NC–An initiative that will determine how Triangle area universities access, manage, and share ever-growing stores of digital data launched this fall with funding from the Triangle Universities Center for Advanced Studies, Inc. (TUCASI).

The two-year TUCASI data-Infrastructure Project (TIP) will deploy a federated data cyberinfrastructure—or data cloud—that will manage and store digital data for Duke University, NC State University, UNC Chapel Hill, and the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and allow the campuses to more seamlessly share data with each other, with national research projects, and private sector partners in Research Triangle Park and beyond.

RENCI and the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Center at UNC Chapel Hill manage the $2.7 million TIP. The provosts, heads of libraries and chief information officers at the three campuses signed off on the project just before the start of the fall semester.

“The TIP focuses on federation, sharing and reuse of information across departments and campuses without having to worry about where the data is physically stored or what kind of computer hardware or software is used to access it,” said Richard Marciano, TIP project director, and also professor at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS), executive director of the DICE Center, and a chief scientist at RENCI. ”Creating infrastructure to support future Triangle collaboratives will be very powerful.”

The TIP includes three components—classroom capture, storage, and future data and policy, which will be implemented in three phases. In phase one, each campus and RENCI will upgrade their storage capabilities and a platform-independent system for capturing and sharing classroom lectures and activities will be developed.

“Online content is constantly being created, but there is no system in place to share it across the campuses,” said Samantha Earp, head of academic services at Duke’s Office of Information Technology and lead for the TIP classroom capture working group. “Our group will look at coordinated approaches to capturing and sharing content. The tools we use might differ from campus to campus, but we can develop best practices and look at models that will allow us to share content regardless of how it was created.”

In phase two, the TIP team will develop policies and practices for short- and long-term data storage and access. Once developed, the policies and practices will guide the research team as it creates a flexible, sustainable digital archive, which will connect to national repositories and national data research efforts. Phase three will establish policies for adding new collections to the TIP data cloud and for securely sharing research data, a process that often requires various restrictions.

“Implementation of a robust technical and policy infrastructure for data archiving and sharing will be key to maintaining the Triangle universities’ position as leaders in data-intensive, collaborative research,” said Kristin Antelman, lead researcher for the future data and policy working group and associate director for the Digital Library at NC State.

The tasks of the TIP research team will include designing a model for capturing, storing and accessing course content, determining best practices for search and retrieval, and developing mechanisms for sharing archived content among the TIP partners, across the Triangle area and with national research initiatives. Campus approved social media tools, such as YouTube and iTunesU, will be integrated into the system.

“The data infrastructure we develop will have an impact well beyond our three campuses,” said Reagan Moore, head of the TIP storage working group, co-director of the DICE Center, a UNC SILS faculty member and a RENCI chief scientist. “We intend to demonstrate how data initiatives in other regions can build similar systems. This is an opportunity for North Carolina to be recognized as a leader in developing federated, multi-institutional data infrastructure.”

About RENCI

The Renaissance Computing Institute, a multi-institutional organization, brings together multidisciplinary experts and advanced technologies to address pressing research issues and to find solutions to complex problems that affect the quality of life in North Carolina, our nation and the world.  Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.

Media contact:
Karen Green, RENCI
kgreen@renci.org
919.445.9648 (office)
919-619-8213 (mobile)

How will our grandchildren understand the dramatic events of the 2008 U.S. presidential election if they can’t access the rich digital information that documented and, arguably, influenced the process?

To create a “memory” to deliver today’s digital information reliably to future generations, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype (TPAP) project is addressing key challenges in safeguarding, preserving and providing access to authentic electronic records as the nation’s information becomes increasingly digital.

To support this effort, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure recently awarded nearly $1 million to the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group at RENCI and the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The TPAP project, built on the innovative DICE iRODS (Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System), has been recognized for enabling transformational progress in digital preservation research, receiving an Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Award in 2006.

“The goal is to identify the basic preservation rules and procedures that automate the management of authentic archives over decades or longer,” said Reagan Moore, professor, RENCI chief scientist for data intensive cyber environments, and principal investigator of the research project. “The TPAP project is developing a reference implementation for preservation environments that can be used as a starter kit.”

iRODS rules-enabled automation is essential for the TPAP prototype to be able to preserve, validate and provide long-term access to mushrooming collections of digital data as they grow to petabytes in size and hundreds of millions of files. (A petabyte is one million gigabytes or about 100 years of a standard television signal.)

For example, the iRODS system can enforce retention and disposition policies for each file that is registered, and check whether the policies have changed over time.

“The ultimate goal is to have an archive that cleans up after itself,” said Richard Marciano, RENCI chief scientist for persistent archives and digital preservation, professor at SILS, and co-principal investigator. “The iRODs middleware allows you to specify the management policy for the archives or repository, and turn these specifications into a set of rules, without having to change the iRODS code. This allows easy customization of how the archives behave, creating a system that is self-managed based on rules that can be individualized for each organization and users.”

As a testbed for preserving electronic records collections from NARA that must be maintained for “the life of the Republic,” the TPAP project includes six partners nationwide. Along with RENCI and SILS, the other partners are the University of Maryland; the Rocket Center in West Virginia; the University of California, San Diego; and Georgia Tech. The separate partners are taking advantage of iRODS’ ability to incorporate different types of storage resources across the six sites to form a single unified “virtual collection” that lets users easily share data, while enabling replication of data between the sites for added protection.

“The DICE group is world-renowned for its expertise in large-scale data management and persistent archives for digital preservation,” said José-Marie Griffiths, dean of SILS. “Managing several million records of digital data for the NARA TPAP project to ensure that our nation’s information is safeguarded and available to all its citizens over the long-term is a significant challenge. The assembled team is especially well qualified to address these issues and produce usable results.”

The TPAP project is led by Reagan W. Moore, Ph.D., principal investigator; Arcot K. Rajasekar, Ph.D., and Richard J. Marciano, Ph.D., RENCI chief scientists, professors in SILS and co-PIs; Antoine de Torcy, research associate; Leesa Brieger, RENCI senior research software developer; Jonathan Crabtree, SILS graduate student; Jewel Ward, doctoral student and research assistant from UNC Chapel Hill; Michael Wan, iRODS architect; Wayne Schroeder, senior software designer and developer; and Sheau-Yen Chen, data grid system administrator of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation.

The funding from the National Archives and Records Administration, Electronic Records Archives Program is $953,988 for one year.

Story: UNC School of Information and Library Science

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together teams of researchers, engineers, technologists and leaders in government, business, the arts and humanities to attack major research questions and community issues in ways that accelerate discovery and drive innovation. RENCI has nationally significant expertise and capabilities in high performance computing, visualization, collaborative tools, networking, device prototyping, and data systems as well as engagement sites across the state. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization. For more, see www.renci.org.

Links
UNC School of Information and Library Science
Data Intensive Cyber Environments group
Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype
National Archives and Records Administration