SCIENCE

Sustainable Policy-Based Data Management, Sharing, and Preservation

The Data Intensive Cyber Environments Center (DICE Center) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has announced the third annual User Group Meeting for iRODS, the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, on "Sustainable Policy-Based Data Management, Sharing, and Preservation." The meeting, which will be held February 17 - 18, 2011, is being cosponsored by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and will be held at the RENCI Europa Center in Chapel Hill.

The user meeting is an opportunity for the growing iRODS community to participate in sessions on applications of iRODS, discuss sustainability initiatives, and learn about new planned technology development. The sessions are all focused on helping users implement and extend the new paradigm of sustainable policy-based data management for the sharing and preservation of today's diverse and rapidly growing digital data collections.

Meeting organizers invite papers and posters on applications of iRODS, client interfaces, integration examples, and more, with submissions due January 17, 2011. More information on the meeting, the call for papers and posters, and registration is available on the iRODS wiki at https://www.irods.org/index.php/iRODS_User_Group_Meeting_2011 .

iRODS is advanced open source data grid technology for creating shareable "virtual" digital data collections, which can range from personal collections to the largest scales -- petabytes of data with hundreds of millions of files -- and span sites distributed across the hall or around the globe.

The iRODS User Meeting will bring together users new to iRODS who want to learn how to get the most out of the advanced technology with others already using iRODS and developers in the open source project.

Because iRODS provides key data management features not found in other open source systems, there is rapid growth in use of the software.

Responding to this demand, a new collaboration between iRODS@RENCI and the DICE team is working to expand production support for new iRODS user communities and sustainable development support for features requested by current and future iRODS users. The user meeting will provide an opportunity to interact with both DICE and RENCI staff.

The meeting will feature sessions on:

• New features in iRODS and new versions of the Rule Engine
• Applications of iRODS in data grids, digital libraries, archives
• iRODS interfaces including Jargon and user-supported clients
• Sustainability plans for iRODS open source software
• User feature request prioritization, and more.