Source: Own illustration
The time has come! Coscine – the platform for research data management (RDM) is moving into regular operation as of April 2023 and we are popping the corks!
Find out more about how Coscine came to be and what it means for you in this blog post.
Coscine is a platform developed at the IT Center to help researchers work with their research data. The RDM platform stands for Collaborative Scientific Integration Environment and is designed to help manage the increasing complexity of project members, services, and data. Researchers work with their data in different ways, and there is no monolithic solution that fits all. Therefore, Coscine takes an integrative approach that allows for a variety of methods and needs to be addressed.
The goal of Coscine is to provide an open and integrative solution that allows established solutions to be linked and support metadata management during the research process. Coscine is developed and operated as an open source project to foster a community of users who can continuously work to improve the platform and meet the diverse needs of researchers.
The technology behind Coscine
Coscine relies on modern technologies and proven standards to improve research data management. To ensure compliance with FAIR principles, Coscine uses an object store based on S3 and an advanced database architecture for metadata. Structural verification of RDF graphs can be performed through SHACL application profiles.
Coscine can also be integrated into local processes in an automated way and supports searching for data from various sources. Using established technologies such as the REST API and ElasticSearch, data and metadata can be automatically retrieved from local systems. This enables the development of complex services to support processes. Coscine thus provides a solid foundation for research data management.
What happened so far…
The development of Coscine started in 2019 at the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University in the department “Research Processes & Data Management” and was designed for the application area research. After an extensive pilot phase, which started in March 2020, this has now been successfully completed and the decision has been made: Coscine is going into regular operation!
Since April 2023, Coscine has been available to all researchers at RWTH Aachen and their cooperation members for the storage, management, and archiving of research and metadata generated in the context of research projects.
Further information, documentation, and help about Coscine
If you want to learn more about the platform and how to manage research data, you can find information on the Coscine website and its documentation. If you encounter any problems while using Coscine, the IT-ServiceDesk is available to assist you by phone, chat or email.
Want to read more about Coscine? No problem! You can find all previous blog posts about Coscine on both our IT Center blog and on the RDM blog.
Have you tried Coscine yet? What do you like best? Let us know in the comments!
Responsible for the content of this article are Ilona Lang and Arlinda Ujkani.
