Development of the RDMS

In 2018, UG & UMCG launched a long-term project to develop a system for managing research data that fulfills the requirements of modern scientific data management. The system should be usable for both researchers and institutions, centralized and managed by the CIT department, and compliant with 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 interface, it was mainly written to facilitate:

• User and permission management
• Management of groups and projects
• Creation of metadata templates
• Policy implementation
• 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 Faculty of Science and Engineering (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 undergo further development over its lifetime, with functionalities being extended during the platform's use.

Please mail us if you have further questions or suggestions!

While this wiki outlines the functionalities of the RDMS, it is not exhaustive. We are actively working on a comprehensive manual, and this wiki serves to provide an overview of the current functionalities.