iRODS

The RDMS web portal was autonomously developed at the UG, but it is based on iRODS, the integrated Rule-Oriented Data Management System.

As the name suggests, iRODS is a data management system with additional rule functionality for automated tasks. It was designed as an archiving system for large amounts of data, and its open-source nature allows for a high adaptability for custom applications. Compared to other systems, iRODS offers a powerful functionality to directly enrich existing data with metadata and it also offers extensive possibilities to search/query for (meta)data, which can be helpful for data retrieval, automation, and storage management.

iRODS is maintained by a consortium and is open source software. Members of the consortium are research institutions, big international companies, and other (private) members. The UG is a consortium member and as such can influence the future development of iRODS and co-finances its maintenance and development.

In the Netherlands, there are multiple universities that are using iRODS as the basis of their data management solutions and which are also (partly) members of the iRODS consortium. Examples are Yoda, which was developed and is used at University of Utrecht, or the Radboud Data Repository at Nijmegen. Moreover, there is an instance of iRODS hosted by SURF as a service to other research institutes.

At the UG we chose iRODS as the basis for our data management system because it offers a high flexibility/customizability, guarantees high transparency of the underlining code due to its open source nature, and has been proven successful for this kind of service at other institutions worldwide.

If you want to learn more about iRODS, we recommend you to check out the documentation at the official website. For more system-specific questions, like if the RDMS has a functionality you need or would like to see developed using iRODS, you can also contact RDMS support.