# About DERIVA

[DERIVA](http://deriva.isrd.isi.edu/) is  an innovative open-source scientific asset management platform designed to support scientific collaboration through the full lifecycle of data - from early experiment design, to data acquisition, analyses and ultimately publication.

DERIVA can adapt to evolving and complex data models and data types. DERIVA supports continuous FAIRness by promoting self-curation, fine-grain access control, automated creation of global unique IDs for every data element, versioning, provenance, exchange of data through structured and documented data collections (BDBags).

DERIVA provides authentication, fine-grained authorization, secured access, and extensive logging. The authentication service works with many options, including the ability for users to authenticate with their NIH or home institutions via [Globus Auth](https://www.globus.org/tags/globus-auth), which is an OAUTH2 authentication and authorization infrastructure widely used in NIH environments. DERIVA supports Globus Groups in fine-grained access policy.

## Features

DERIVA allows scientists, labs and organizations to:

* Ingest and effectively describe diverse scientific assets.
* Organize and discover assets via rich metadata models.
* Store and retrieve assets quickly and easily.
* Integrate and share data collections.
* Enforce rights management/access control as needed.

DERIVA combines a powerful entity-relationship database approach with a flexible, customizable user interface to link biomedical data and metadata to attributes users can find through search and filters in a familiar shopping-cart-like experience. DERIVA has been applied to [diverse application domains](http://isrd.isi.edu/deriva/projects.html).

## FAIRness
Data intensive scientific discovery can be accelerated and collaboration enhanced when the data associated with the discovery are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable---the so called FAIR principals.

DERIVA promotes FAIR data production by:

* **F**: providing rich metadata using an Entity-Relationship model to express relationships between diverse data elements;
* **A**: offering rich access control and access to metadata via standard HTTP web service interfaces;
* **I**: integrating with standardized terms defined by collaborators, consortium or communities; and
* **R**: supporting dynamic model evolution so that the data presented accurately represents the current structure and state of knowledge within an investigation.