BIG DATA

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have launched a center that will bring together scholars and technical experts to solve the pressing problems of managing and sharing today’s deluge of digital data.  In addition to building shared collections, the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Center supports software systems for data curation and data preservation so that today’s knowledge will be available for future generations.

The DICE Center, which is funded by external research grants, draws on leading data management technology whose advanced generic nature makes possible a remarkable array of uses, from helping the National Archives preserve the nation’s digital information including records that document our nation’s experience, to helping digital libraries cope with the ever-increasing size and complexity of digital knowledge, to enabling sharing of digital data by large-scale interdisciplinary scientific research collaborations across the nation and the globe. 

“We believe this new data center will serve as a model of interoperability, collaboration and sustainability for the 17-campus UNC system and universities across North Carolina, the United States and indeed, the world,” said Bernadette Gray-Little, executive vice chancellor and provost.
  
At UNC, the Libraries, Information and Technology Services, the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), the School of Information and Library Science (SILS)and numerous research projects will all make use of the Center’s technologies to organize and curate collections, create digital repositories and federate data resources. 

“As digital information expands at a staggering rate, there is a pressing need for this center,” said Tony Waldrop, vice chancellor for research and economic development and chair of the Center’s Oversight Board. “We are very fortunate that a world-renowned team of researchers with expertise in data management, curation and preservation will provide leadership in this field.”


The Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group joined Carolina’s nationally recognized  School of Information and Library Science in fall 2008. The award-winning research group, formerly of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has an international reputation in developing digital data technologies. 

For more than 10 years the DICE group’s data grid technologies have been used in research projects worldwide to manage large, distributed data collections and support discovery, access, retrieval, replication, archiving, and analysis tasks. The researchers most recently released iRODS, the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which introduced user-settable rules that automate complex management policies, helping users handle today’s mushrooming collections of digital data.

iRODS harnesses the full power of cyberinfrastructure and virtual technologies to integrate functions that free digital data collections from the constraints of space—whether physical, administrative, or disciplinary—and time, through long-term preservation. The iRODS software assembles distributed data into shared collections, and the rule-based architecture enables users to develop and enforce community policies, without changing core iRODS code, so that they can easily and flexibly manage their data collections and verify policy enforcement to ensure appropriate access and authentic data.

“The indispensable role of digital data across society, and the increasing size and complexity of data collections, are reaching a critical point,” said Richard Marciano, founder and executive director of the Center. “With the growing need for practical digital data technologies, the new DICE Center is already collaborating with many important projects across the UNC at Chapel Hill system as well as national and international partners, helping them harness their digital data collections and working with them to efficiently create, share and preserve new knowledge.”

The Center includes Reagan Moore, director; Richard Marciano, executive director; and co-director-Arcot Rajasekar all of whom are SILS professors and RENCI chief scientists. Other staff include Antoine de Torcy, data grid developer, Chien-Yi Hou, digital preservation specialist, Mike Wan, chief architect; Wayne Schroeder, product manager; Sheau-Yen Chen, data grid system administrator; Bing Zhu, computational scientist; Paul Tooby, community development coordinator; and Lucas Gilbert, consultant and Java developer. 
The campus-wide DICE Center will initially include three core research units that form the foundation for data intensive and data lifecycle activities. 

Marciano will serve as director of the Sustainable Archives and Libraries Technologies (SALT) unit, which will be an interdisciplinary unit focused on developing information technology strategies and conducting research in the area of digital materials and records collection and preservation. Rajasekar will serve as director of the Data Grid and Policy unit, which will explore the design and development of rule-based data middleware capabilities and Helen Tibbo, SILS professor, will serve as director of the Digital Curation @ Carolina unit. The latter unit will help UNC preserve its digital assets with a focus on training and service learning.

To facilitate interactions with the many communities at UNC that require data management infrastructure, appointments will be established for research fellows in the DICE Center. The first research fellows to be named are: José-Marie Griffiths, deputy director (biomedical informatics) of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (TraCS) Institute; Jan Prins, department chair, Department of Computer Science; and Javed Mostafa, Frances Carroll McColl Term associate professor at SILS and the Biomedical Research Imaging Center.

DICE Center Web site: http://dice.unc.edu 
SILS Web site: http://sils.unc.edu/
RENCI Web site: http://www.renci.org/
iRODS Web site: http://www.irods.org
TraCS Institute Web site: http://tracs.unc.edu/