CASFI data sharing platform

Abstract

Measurement-based research benefits greatly from efficient and minimum-effort management of large-scale data and their metadata. Effective data management has become a key in promoting data sharing within our community. During the past decade, a great deal of effort has been devoted to building Internet data archives. Several institutions run repositories where they post metadata of their collections, along with the data themselves, if their size is not prohibitively large. However, these repositories have been developed independently with different user interfaces, which adds complexity when users look for data of relevance scattered all over the Internet. CASFI (Collect, Analyze, and Share for Future Internet) is a team of four laboratories that collaborate actively in measurement-driven research. In order to facilitate our collaboration, we propose a new data management system called the Data Sharing Platform (DSP) that can be used by any institution to manage its own data and share it easily. The DSP is flexible in order to adapt to any infrastructure, and assists users with the data registration process. Our platform not only manages local data but also integrates remote data in its local database, thus offering a consistent user interface to browse and search the local data archive as well as other remote archives. Our system standardizes the entire process from data registration, uploading, browsing, and search. It is implemented and deployed at our four institutions and tested extensively. We hope to expand its user base to greater research community.