August 2020 – Phase 2 Partner Development Workshop
With COVID-19 preventing travel and large gatherings, January workshop attendees joined a virtual workshop to hear Phase 1 partner system lessons learned, progress updates, and view demonstrations of the new researcher workflows facilitated by their RAS integrations. Phase 2 partner system developers described their integration use cases and technical requirements for RAS Phase 2, including an extension of RAS-federated identity providers, accounting linking, and user experience modifications. RAS Phase 2 features are scoped for code completion in early November so RAS can deploy updates before the end of the year.
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) attended the workshop as potential future RAS partners.
August 2020 – Phase 1 Production Release
NIH deployed a RAS-dbGaP Visa and associated services that allow researchers to log in to RAS one time to access any integrated repository and run an analysis for up to 15 days without re-authenticating. NIH staff or extramural researchers can log into integration systems/applications using their NIH or eRA Commons credentials. Auth tokens move with the researcher as they navigate to any of the four Phase 1 Data Platforms. Existing rules for authorization are enforced so a user can only access data they have been authorized to view.
RAS uses open standards and protocols and provides integrating systems with many standards-based options for integration.
January 2020 – Phase 1 Partner Development Workshop
The RAS team hosted a workshop at NIH to provide partners with an update on the current state of RAS and the identity and access data available in RAS. The workshop also provided participants an opportunity to agree on the design for each RAS integration use case (interoperability step-by-step, application-to-application) and define the data to be contained within the tokens.
In addition to the participating NIH ICs, the following organizations were present: University of Chicago, Gen3, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Broad Institute, Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Seven Bridges, Globus, Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, and Institute for Systems Biology (ISB).
Important progress was made toward finalizing the initial architecture for Phase 1 of RAS-IC System integration use cases (CRDC/AnVIL, KFDRC/BioData Catalyst), and discussions were initiated for Phase 2 integrations (NDA, AoU, CFDE, NCBI). RAS also gathered requirements for security, technical research spikes, the first RAS-dbGaP Visa (based on GA4GH standards (link is external)), and longer-term requirements.
October 2019 – Globus-eRA Integration
NIH staff and extramural researchers with an electronic Research Administration (eRA) Commons account can now use those credentials with Globus to access resources and services. This integration is the result of a partnership between the NIH CIT and Globus, a division of the University of Chicago that provides data management capabilities—including managed data transfer and sharing—to research organizations.
When a researcher visits Globus, he or she will be able to login using eRA Commons credentials thanks to the OpenID Connect protocol. This new NIH capability provides greater flexibility and can be rapidly adopted and extended to support other integration partners in the future.
