Speaker
Description
ICAT is a flexible solution for managing scientific metadata and data from a wide variety of domains following the FAIR data principles. In addition to the core service providing relational models for scientific and administrative metadata, there are a number of additional components that extend the functionality to provide web-based user interfaces, DOI minting and landing pages, plugin-based data retrieval, and more.
The open-source project is maintained by an international collaboration with members from the facilities and organisations running ICAT: STFC (supporting Diamond and ISIS), ESRF, HZB, ALBA, Sirius, and SESAME. The software has a proven history of operating at scale to meet the needs of these organisations, with the Diamond Light Source storing records for 6 billion files amounting to 90PB of data. It also allows facilities to build customisations on top of the common core functionality for their specific use cases, such as ESRF's Human Organ Atlas.
This talk will provide an overview of the ICAT project and software components, current and future developments, and how it can be used to build curated, high quality metadata collections for scientific experiments.