BIRN provides capabilities that allow you to manage and share data between you and your collaborators.
Data Access & Movement
This capability allows BIRN users to access remote data storage services, primarily for access to file-based data. At each site in a network of collaborating sites, the data access capability enables the site to provide remote users with the ability to store files, retrieve files, and delete files. Users may perform the store, retrieve, and delete operations on individual files, multiple files, individual directories, and recursively over directory hierarchies. Operations on the data access service are secure and require user authentication and sufficient file access permissions to authorize the operation, as provided by BIRN security capabilities. You can find more information at software.nbirn.org.
Status: In production
Contact: Rob Schuler (schuler at isi dot edu)
Metadata Access and Management
BIRN currently recommends two tools for storing and accessing metadata (data that describes BIRN datasets), both developed by early BIRN user teams. New user teams may choose a tool based on their specific needs. You can find more information at software.nbirn.org.
Status: In production
Contact: Rob Schuler (schuler at isi dot edu)
Data Synchronization
This new capability will allow BIRN users to synchronize files in source and destination storage systems. The tool compares the contents of two data directories using a variety of comparator options and creates a list of files to be transferred from the source to the destination to synchronize the two systems. You can find more information at software.nbirn.org.
Status: In development (forecast for early 2010)
Contact: Rob Schuler (schuler at isi dot edu)
Group Policy Enforcement
The policy enforcement system runs on storage servers and retrieves user group information from a BIRN-wide Group Policy Management service to determine if a user’s request for data access or storage is allowed.
Status: In development (forecast for early 2010)
Contact: Rachana Ananthakrishnan (ranantha at mcs dot anl dot gov)
