Development of the RDMS

In 2018, UG & UMCG launched a long-term project to develop a system to manage research data which fulfills the requirements of modern, scientific data management. The system should be usable for the use to researchers of both institutions, it should be centralize at and managed by the CIT department, and should allow to adhere to the FAIR principles .

With that initial requirements in mind, the Research Data Management System (RDMS) was conceived and the the project team started working with researchers and using their input to define needs and requirements for such a system.

In 2023, after a lot of improvements and addition of needed functionality, the RDMS exited its project status and became an official CIT service.

But that is not where the story ends: The RDMS team is still collecting feedback from the researchers and continuously improves the system. Therefore, we are also happy to receive your ideas/feedback. Do not hesitate to contact us!

While the basis of the RDMS is the data management software iRODS, we built a RDMS portal which extends the functionalities of iRODS and makes the platform more easily accessible for users.

While there are a lot of functionalities of the RDMS web portal, it was mainly written to facilitate:

• User and permission management
• Management of groups and projects
• Creation of metadata templates
• Easily append metadata to files and folders
• Predefined workflows for scientific projects like user management and archiving project data.

Since the beginning of 2022 the new Data Stewards of FSE started testing the RDMS. While we are still testing the different Windows clients for the RDMS, we are also now in the phase of contacting research groups from FSE and other faculties to coach them how to move data to the RDMS.

We are putting much work into assessing the needs of our users for data storage and archiving. And maybe to extend the RDMS with triggers for action to process data on a different platform or to automatically ingest data from a different source.

The RDMS will be further developed during its lifetime; we will extend the functionalities of the RDMS during the use of this platform.

Please mail us if you have further questions or suggestions!

This wiki describes the functionalities of the RDMS, but is by no means exhaustive. We are working on a complete manual and this wiki will provide you with an oversight of the current functionalities.