KeyCloak as an authentication proxy for BioDATEN

Published on Wednesday, 07 July 2021

Identity and access management is a core component for BioDATEN as for all research data management infrastructures. Jonathan Bauer from the University of Freiburg just summarized the state of developments within BioDATEN for services like Invenio or Hubzero for a presentation for the SDC infrastructure working group. The main challenge is the interplay of services currently developed for the BioDATEN community. A contemporary user experience relies on a single-sign on concept, enabling users to access all BioDATEN services with just one set of credentials. BioDATEN relies on the ELIXIR AAI as pan-european infrastructure providing EXLIXIR IDs for its users. KeyCloak is an open source framework for identity and access management with single-sign on functionality. It supports many common identity providers and protocols like e.g. Active Directory, LDAP, SAML or OpenID-Connect, allowing identity brokering and linking of multiple identities. The framework is capable of handling different forms of authorisation and is very customizable for this purpose. The aim for BioDATEN is the establishment of trust delegation among BioDATEN services via KeyCloak. Services shall interact with each other on the users behalf e.g. allowing the submission of a bioinformatic analysis workflow from the BioDATEN portal which uses a dataset as input which is stored within the Invenio publication repository.

(DvS, JK)

SARS-CoV-2 Data Analysis and Monitoring with Galaxy

Published on Wednesday, 30 June 2021

The Galaxy community has been working in analysing SARS-CoV-2 data analysis since the beginning of the pandemic (https://covid19.galaxyproject.org). Motivated by several European countries joining the monitoring efforts to identify variants of concern, we are organising a workshop on "SARS-CoV-2 Data Analysis and Monitoring with Galaxy".

The 4-day online workshop will take place on August 9-12 is aimed at clinicians and researchers that deal with SARS-CoV-2 data, including variant calling and data submission to ENA. The sessions will be pre-recorded with live support in chat and live Q&A sessions. The workshop is free of charge and all the training materials will stay available online after the workshop. Please find the full program, registration and more details on the events page:

https://galaxyproject.eu/event/2021-06-21-sars-cov-2-data-analysis-monitoring-training/

(BSS)

BioDATEN proposing measures to sustain research data management

Published on Thursday, 24 June 2021

BioDATEN took place in the SDC working group meeting on business models to discuss options to establish sustainable support of research data management on the 14 June 2021. The increasing complexity of requirements necessitates stronger management of a university's research data management (FDM). In order to cope with the increasing variety of tasks and to ensure a close exchange into the faculties and institutions, the area of research data management should be strengthened. A central task for research data management is to extend it to the entire institution. Only in this way can the university as a whole credibly represent its commitment to the public and funding agencies and establish binding standards and concepts. Strategic considerations include recommendations that should be made to future research and collaborative projects in the various disciplines. Such projects typically require support in the various aspects of data management and technical infrastructure.

The talk given by a BioDATEN member presented current developments of concepts over the years and considerations by the various stakeholders in that process. It tried to address the contradiction of short-term project-oriented research endeavours and long-term requirements proposed by the "good scientific practice". The suggestions proposed try to alleviate the problem of acquiring qualified IT staff and specialists in research data management. The challenge of getting qualified personnel is exacerbated by the fact that the range of requirements on the one hand and knowledge on the other hand are much higher than they were a decade or two ago. Experience in many CRCs and similarly large projects showed that (temporary) partial positions often could not be filled appropriately. Therefore, alternative models addressing these problems are currently being considered at various levels. The goal is to improve the supply of suitable personnel in the various task areas and to combine job shares in full job equivalents (with longer duration of contracts). These positions should be concentrated in the respective departments (like university libraries or computer centers) and dedicated in their respective proportions to activities in the various ongoing research projects. Payroll and personnel management will be handled by the respective department responsible. This ensures that staff work on near-current developments and are informed about existing services and offerings in the area of research data management and can bring them to the field with local support. This gradually improves support at the institutes and faculties, as integration into a team and connection to ongoing developments is ensured.

(DvS)