The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has joined the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) Consortium, the entity that supports a highly-configurable open source infrastructure used globally for data management, sharing, and integration.
The iRODS Consortium was founded about a year ago by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the Max Planck Society. Its purpose is to bring together universities, research organizations, businesses, and government agencies to guide the continued development of the iRODS data management platform, which was created by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments group at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of California at San Diego; to obtain funding to support development efforts; and to broaden the community of users.
"We are delighted to join the iRODS Consortium," Guy Coates, team leader of WTSI's informatics systems group, said in a statement. "We need efficient management systems to ensure that our large-scale datasets are of value … [we] need to make sure we can produce, manage and use genome information as efficiently as possible."
Brand Fortner, the director of the iRODS Consortium and a senior researcher at RENCI, said in his comments that WTSI "will be an extremely valuable member of the consortium."