Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) - Archiving and Preservation

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Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) - Archiving and Preservation

Tracey P. Lauriault
For the uber geeks and science data nerds!  This is very good news!

2 Colleagues have moved from San Diego Centre for Super Computing to North Carolina U to work on this.  Open source federated data preservation!  Awesome!

Tracey
**************

UNC News Release:
http://uncnews.unc.edu/news/science-and-technology/carolina-attracts-world-renowned-large-scale-data-research-team-dice.html

For immediate use: Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008

Carolina attracts world-renowned large-scale data research team;
DICE group joins School of Information and Library Science

CHAPEL HILL - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is now home
to the world-renowned Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group
(formerly known as Data Intensive Computing Environments group), long of
the University of California, San Diego's  Supercomputer Center.

The research team will hold appointments in Carolina's nationally
recognized School of Information and Library Science with research space in
Chapel Hill's Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The award-winning
research group brings expertise in development of digital data
technologies, including open source software that enables sharing of data
in collaborative research, publication of data in digital libraries, and
preservation of data in persistent archives for use by future generations,
along with a research portfolio exceeding $10 million.

"The opportunity to recruit an entire group of active researchers with an
international reputation for vision, innovation and accomplishment is rare,
perhaps even unprecedented in information and library science," said
Chancellor Holden Thorp. "Their work is closely aligned with the school's
efforts in the areas of digital libraries and archives, databases,
institutional repositories, information retrieval and information
management. Our students and many others across campus will have an
extraordinary opportunity to learn from and collaborate with this
world-class research team."

Research team leaders Reagan Moore, Ph.D.; Richard Marciano, Ph.D.; and
Arcot Rajasekar, Ph.D.; are in the process of being appointed as full
professors in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS),
recognized by U.S. News and World Report magazine as the top school of its
kind in the nation. Other members of the DICE group will move to Carolina
in the next few months.

"The DICE group will function as a magnet for students and collaborators,"
said José-Marie Griffiths, school dean. "The group will help us further
extend the research computing infrastructure at UNC that will benefit us
all, improve our capacity and capability to conduct larger-scale research
projects, while inspiring new generations of students to understand that
considerable attention and deliberate effort are needed to ensure both
effective and long-term access to information."

Group members will interact with colleagues in the school and other campus
units on academic digital library and preservation research efforts,
initially focusing on current collaborations such as the National Archives
and Records Administration Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype
and the National Science Foundation Software Development for
Cyberinfrastructure project, along with others such as the Library of
Congress Video Archiving project.

"A major challenge for the next several decades will be managing the
enormous amount of digital data we create in science and research," said
Alan Blatecky, RENCI's interim director. "The DICE group has years of
experience and an international reputation for developing innovative
systems for managing distributed digital data. This will be a huge
advantage for Carolina as the wave of new data rapidly becomes a tsunami.
We will have the opportunity to extend our leadership nationally and
internationally in managing, sharing, publishing and archiving research
data."

Other potential areas for collaboration include biomedical and health data
management, grid computing and cyberinfrastructure with Carolina's
Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute and its recently announced
National Institute of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award,
visualization of large-scale data sets with the College of Arts and
Sciences' department of computer science and with RENCI, as well as shared
institutional repositories and digital library systems with RENCI and the
Triangle Research Libraries Network. Additional collaborations in the
sciences, social sciences and humanities are expected.

 "The DICE group, in collaboration with SILS, will pursue development of
undergraduate, master's and doctoral level courses on data grids and
preservation environments," Moore said. "The opportunity to teach academic
courses strongly influenced the decision to move to SILS and UNC. We are
also interested in pursuing collaborations for the creation of campus
cyberinfrastructure and participating on data management projects in
support of education, patient medical records and emergency preparedness."

For more than 10 years the group's Storage Research Broker (SRB) data grid
has been used by research teams worldwide to automate all aspects of
manipulation of large, distributed data files, including discovery, access,
retrieval, management, replication, archiving and analysis. DICE most
recently developed iRODS, the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data
System, which introduced user-settable rules that automate complex
management policies, helping users tame today's mushrooming collections of
digital data.

The team has worked on national and international projects, providing data
management systems for major grid and distributed research projects,
including the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the
Worldwide University Network, California Digital Library-Digital
Preservation Repository, the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge
Integration Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the
Geoscience network.

On Thursday (Aug. 29), the DICE group will receive the 2008 J. Franklin
Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists
during the group's annual meeting in San Francisco. A society news release
said the award honors "an individual, institution or organization that
promotes greater public awareness, appreciation or support of archives. The
DICE group was selected for its long-time support of and involvement in the
archives profession's work to address the challenges of managing,
preserving, and providing access to electronic records."  
School of Information and Library Science Web site: http://sils.unc.edu/
RENCI Web site: http://www.renci.org/
DICE Web site: http://diceresearch.org
iRODS Web site: http://www.irods.org
iRODS launch release:
http://diceresearch.org/DICE_Site/Examples/Entries/2008/3/3_Introducing_iRO
DS_Version_1.0_.html Clinical and Translational Science Award release:
http://uncnews.unc.edu/news/health-and-medicine/new-federally-funded-health
-initiative-to-speed-benefits-
of-science-to-north-carolinians.html Society
of American Archivists Web site:
http://www.archivists.org/recognition/sanfrancisco2008-awards.asp#top

School of Information and Library Science contact: Wanda Monroe, (919)
962-8366, [hidden email] RENCI contact: Karen Green, (919) 445-9648,
[hidden email]
DICE contact: Paul Tooby, (858) 822-3654, [hidden email]
UNC News Services contact: Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093, [hidden email]


--
Tracey P. Lauriault
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault