Development Of An Integrated Lifecycle Of RDM Tools: Looking Back And Forward @ KU Leuven
Creators: name: Bloemen, Dieuwertje
name: Barcena Roig, Ingrid
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: IDCC25
Papers
Curation infrastructure: Tools, systems and services that are in development
Curation infrastructure: Evaluations of existing tools and principles in data curation
Sustainability and strategy: Work on curation processes, techniques, costs, and workflows
Dataverse
iRODS
RDM tools
Interoperability
Data selection

description: After the creation of an institutional RDM policy some years ago, KU Leuven decided it was crucial to create an ecosystem of RDM tools for the entire RDM life cylce to enable KU Leuven researchers to manage their data well and in a FAIR way. During this presentation, we’ll look back on all the tool development and interoperability work up until this point and where we will go from here.

In 2018, KU Leuven started on the road to an institutional data repository, which resulted in the launch of the Dataverse-based “RDR” in January 2022. In line with this, there was also a strong focus on tools to manage data in a structured and metadata-rich way during the research project when data was still being worked on. In the context of this aim, an iRODS instance that would also enable easy and integrated metadata management from the start of a research project via a self-developed portal was launched in March 2023 under the name “ManGO”. KU Leuven further supports a wide range of other RDM tools, including OSF, GitLab, REDCap, SharePoint, and DMP-online. This results in a varied landscape of RDM tools that enable and support KU Leuven researchers in good data management. As one of the four FAIR principles is interoperability, and to fully enable FAIR data management, it was important to facilitate this interoperability of data by ensuring that tools are interoperable with each other, with a first focus being the connection between ManGO and RDR to select and copy data ready for publication.

After the two new RDM tools ManGO and RDR were set up and made available to the researchers by mid-2023, the connection and interoperability were established to facilitate easy publication of research data from ManGO to RDR via the creation of an integration tool for Dataverse that allows connections with ManGO and other RDM tools that have a data exchange API endpoint. The dashboard pulls in data and metadata from external tools in a user-friendly and efficient manner. The tool allows for data comparison between the chosen data source and the intended dataset to avoid unnecessary data duplication and easy curation and selection of what data should or shouldn’t be published in the data repository. The integration tool now also connects GitHub, GitLab, OSF, OneDrive, Sharepoint and any outside iRODS instances to RDR to further simplify the selection of data from multiple platforms for publication. And with the tool being available in open-source, others can easily add on to the list of available tools to pull data from.

A look to the future of the RDM tools at KU Leuven shows further work to improve ManGO and RDR and their integrations. A final tool in development to fill the gap in our ecosystem is to provide a cold storage option for data that will not be reused on the short term and will not be published.