Evaluation of data management and transfer tools for the biomedical community

Abstract

The biomedical community produces and uses a continuously growing amount of data while it lacks an inter-institutional research data management system. The LABIMI/F project founded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) implements an infrastructure to close this gap with an exemplary prototype for the use cases of medical image and genome research data. To determine suitable application(s) for this intention, several criteria for data management and data transfer, concerning their up-to-dateness, usability, metadata and payload management etc., are developed. These criteria are applied to three data management tools (DSpace, Fedora Commons and ISA-Tab tools), and four data transfer tools (PowerFolder, iRODS, CryptShare and Globus-Online), in an use-value analysis (UVA). The UVA reveals that no application meets all criteria; therefore other tools, e.g. eSciDoc, should be evaluated before making a final decision. Fedora Commons scores highly in the category metadata and payload management but has no sufficient user frontend. Therefore, further research is necessary in order to find an appropriate frontend for Fedora Commons. The data transfer tool with the highest total application score is PowerFolder, which provides easy synchronization of files and folders between the users and a central repository.