Developments in the University of Auckland’s Instrument Data Service: The move towards a production ready service.
Chris Seal1, YongJe Kwon1, Noel Zeng1, Libby Li1, Mike Laverick1, Yvette Wharton1 1The University Of Auckland, Auckland New Zealand
Abstract
The University of Auckland’s Instrument Data Service (IDS), based on the ‘MyTardis’ repository software, has been successfully piloted. We are now transitioning to a production service. The timing of this transition matches with a more extensive programme of work to mature research data management capability at the University. As a result of both of these, we have developed several modifications to the underlying MyTardis software.
In keeping with the flexibility built into the software, we have developed our changes as microservices, and we will outline some of these in the talk, including:
•The addition of multiple, unique identifiers into the IDS to hold persistent identifiers (PIDs) for projects, datasets and instruments. These facilitate integration with other University systems, mediated via RAiD.
•Automatic data migration between ‘tiers’ of storage. Data is migrated from fast-tiered storage to slower, more sustainable storage tiers after a set amount of time, defined on a project-by-project basis.
We will also discuss our future development plans to improve our ingestion pipelines. These improvements seek to allow for the validation of metadata and to highlight, for the researcher, where there are known collisions with existing metadata in a way that does not expose information to unauthorised people.
Finally, we will discuss the challenges we have encountered and the motivations, through the lens of the more extensive University programme of maturing research data management, that underpin the changes we have made and are in the process of making.
Biography
Dr Chris Seal is a senior solutions specialist in the Centre for eResearch at The University of Auckland. He leads the development of the University’s Instrument Data Service and has an interest in the use of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). He is a member of the I4IOz community of practice, discussing the use of PIDs for instruments and is on the advisory board for Research Activity Identifiers (RAiD).