Meeting Twin Challenges: Our At-risk Digital History
and the Collaboration Imperative

The mission of the Data Intensive Cyberinfrastructure Foundation addresses two core interrelated problems in today’s digital world:

• The need to share and collaborate with growing digital data collections to solve urgent societal problems in science, medicine, and other areas.

• The need to preserve our digital history long-term, to ensure society’s “memory” is accessible to future generations.

Collaborating with Shared Digital Data

Modern scientific research is faced with increasingly complex questions that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. For example, to understand and develop policies to deal with the spread of invasive species that can threaten human health and agriculture, researchers need access not only to biological information about these species but also to data on the entire ecosystems involved; climate and hydrology data; geochemical data; demographic data; data on possible controls (biological controls, pesticides), etc.

The Foundation supports the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, iRODS, pioneering open source software technology that enables researchers to share large-scale digital data collections in broad collaborations of local, national, and even global scope.

Preserving Digital Data for Future Generations

With ephemeral digital technologies holding virtually all of our key records today, it would be serious indeed if our medical records became unreadable; if our weather, financial, government, and other records disappeared suddenly or gradually eroded; if the National Archives was unable to preserve and provide access to Federal records; if we wound up having a more complete record of WW II than of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

With a wealth of information at our fingertips in the Information Age, people are often surprised and concerned to learn that there is no accepted standard or certified “trustworthy preservation repository” that can today assure preservation of our digital history against the looming threats expressed in the phrase, “digital information lasts forever, or five years, whichever comes first.” Contrary to popular assumption, archivists are not yet able to implement systems capable of preserving digital records for decades let alone centuries. For example, of the more than 4,000 file formats that the National Archives is responsible for preserving, they can today certify preservation of only a single one: plain ASCII text files.

Multiple “quiet” threats, from accelerating obsolescence of software and hardware to proliferating proprietary digital formats to the lack of standard methods of describing and cataloging digital information, combine with a lack of understanding or “data literacy” and sustainable economic models for digital preservation to exacerbate the preservation problem.

The iRODS open source software is internationally recognized as a leading contributor to viable solutions in the vital task of preserving digital data for future generations.

The Data Intensive Cyberinfrastructure Foundation

The Foundation has been formed to support, enhance, and disseminate the results of award-winning innovative academic research efforts at the forefront of creating technologies to meet the interrelated challenges of sharing data in vital collaborative scientific research projects, and preserving electronic records long term.

Working with these ongoing research initiatives, led by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments Center (DICE Center) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Foundation is conducting programs for the long term viability of the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) software and related expertise; broadening education not only in use of the software itself but also to raise the general “data literacy” level (essential for enabling people to deploy viable approaches for collaboration with and preservation of digital data throughout the life cycle); stewardship of the open source iRODS software intellectual property; helping grow and enhancing the vitality of the collaborative open source iRODS community; and more.