Digital asset management for heterogeneous biomedical data in an era of data-intensive science

Biomedical research depends upon increasingly high throughput instruments and sophisticated data analytics. In spite of the significant overhead of handling research data, there is little support for researchers to manage and organize data for purposes of exploration, analysis, and ultimately publication. Shared file systems with metadata coded into directory hierarchies and spreadsheets are the common practice. In this paper, we present a digital asset management approach and system for streamlining data operations and reducing data management overheads for biomedical researchers. It consists of data management tasks including storage, archival, annotation, search, cataloging, publication, and collaboration. We present a preliminary performance evaluation of a key component of the system, and we demonstrate the utility of this approach in a pilot deployment and user study.