Information Management at the INM-7

A linked metadata-based toolset for modelling, annotation, discoverability, and protection of information

More or less a year and a half ago, around the time of the first distribits event, we started exploring a new direction for information management at the INM-7, Research Center Jülich. The goal was to extend beyond the constraints imposed by a DataLad, git, and git-annex-based data management approach (i.e. the need for a git repository to “live somewhere”) to something that connects managed data to the wider world of data infrastructures. Semantic metadata and RDF soon became the necessary ingredients for describing our data such that it becomes interoperable and machine-actionable by design, opening up possibilities to translate and transform infrastructure-dependent datasets into portable yet comprehensive data descriptors. In this talk, we’ll show the set of interoperable metadata-based tools that we have developed to model, annotate, and protect data, and we’ll demonstrate existing deployments in varying use cases, from the management of institute-internal personnel records to the curation of data samples from a research study.