The BIRN Data Management Working Group (Data WG) is responsible for defining BIRN’s data management capabilities, such as data storage, access, and mirroring, along with metadata hosting. The Data WG’s members are computer scientists, software developers, system administrators and biomedical scientists representing participating biomedical research institutes and BIRN itself.
Our initial focus areas include remote file sharing, data authorization, data mirroring and replication, data synchronization, and metadata management. Â These efforts aim to solve data management challenges unique to the biomedical community, such as ensuring security and privacy of protected health information, enabling data to be shared with collaborators while preserving its original ownership, providing software usable by institutes with limited information technology budgets, and making data management services interoperable with existing metadata services and analytics utilities.
We help define and develop data access and sharing capabilities, which BIRN then makes available to the biomedical research community. These capabilities are now facilitating multi-site, collaborative imaging studies.
Participating institutions include Duke University, Harvard University, Stanford University and the Universities of California at Irvine, Los Angeles and San Francisco.  We also are working with domain experts, representing a broad range of data management challenges and biomedical disciplines, to continue broadening BIRN’s capabilities across the research spectrum.
