Active Research Data Management with the Django Globus Portal Framework.

Publishing and sharing data is critical to fostering collaboration and advancing scientific research. Data portals are commonly used to organize, publish, and securely disseminate data—a critical step toward making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). However, the diversity of scientific data types, sizes, and their location present significant challenges, e.g., it is difficult for portals to accommodate heterogenous research products when using strict metadata schemas and rigid interfaces. Thus, there is a need for a user-customizable data portal solution that enables rapid creation of new portals that may be tailored to a researchers needs while accommodating distributed data sources and engaging advanced computing resources. In this paper, we present the Django Globus Portal Framework (DGPF), a tool designed to help users rapidly create secure, customizable, and extensible data portals. DGPF is a powerful and flexible framework that builds upon the Globus platform for authentication, data sharing, creation of automation flows, and search capabilities, allowing for seamless integration with existing research workflows. We present the design and implementation of the DGPF and describe our experiences operating the Argonne Community Data Co-op (ACDC)—a collection of DGPF portals with over 1 M records and over 100 TB of published data that has been accessed by more than 300 users.