Add Use Case CASUS

USe of HIFIS in CASUS in general (CASUS Part one)

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_posts/2022/08/2022-08-04-use-case-casus.md

+---
+title: "Use Case CASUS"
+title_image: globe.jpeg
+data: 2022-08-01
+authors:
+  - "Bussmann, Michael"
+layout: blogpost
+categories:
+  - Use-Case
+tags:
+  - CASUS
+excerpt: >
+    tbd
+---
+
+## CASUS Use Cases for the HIFIS Cloud
+The HIFIS service infrastructure is essential to our strategy towards data-centric research of complex systems across scientific communities and research fields. 
+As an institute of HZDR working on complex systems research using digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, high performance computing or scalable visual and data analytics, we focus on providing cloud-centric solutions for scientific communities and other stakeholders. 
+These solutions provide unique services for researchers, companies, governmental entities and international organizations.
+
+While the hardware infrastructure and the domain specific software solutions are provided by CASUS, we rely on the software infrastructure of HIFIS for federated authentication, authorization and a secure, scalable cloud backends, containerization and orchestration to provide both access to large data sets and the digital workflows for knowledge extraction.
+
+Services we built our solutions on are OpenStack, Singularity, Kubernetes, Jupyte and the Helmholtz AAI. 
+For development, we use Gitlab and CI/CD workflows as well as Mattermost. 
+All these services are provided by HIFIS and leveraging the synergies by not having to maintain these services ourselves are key to providing the solutions we develop to large user communities worldwide with high quality and availability.
+
+In particular, HIFIS and Helmholtz are well-trusted entities that have an international reputation for being able to provide high quality infrastructure for science, research and companies. 
+This holds especially true for the software infrastructure and services provided by HIFIS, as the Helmholtz/HIFIS brand provides trust in quality, availability and long-term sustainability of these services.
+
+In the following we showcase two of these services, one from the research field Health and one from Earth and Environment which we are currently setting up. Further use cases, e.g. from the Research Field Matter, will follow in the future.
+
+## pic 1
+
+The use of pseudonymized and anonymized patient data in a secure, federated way to better understand, diagnose and treat cancer is the big next step in enhancing the quality of decision making in clinics beyond what current guidelines can offer.
+
+CASUS currently is involved in several projects on collecting real world clinical evidence on prostate, lung and breast cancer both from clinical trials and clinical data to enhance the quality of diagnostics, treatment and patient life compared to guideline based decision making.
+In these projects, researchers, the guideline organizations as well as clinics and pharmaceutical companies are highly interested in developing biostatistical and artificial intelligence models based on this large collection of data.
+
+The first step in providing an infrastructure for this is a secure, highly available cloud infrastructure with fine-granular authentication and authorization services that allow access and operation in a federated way. 
+Specifically, while a central instance will provide the largest single portion of data and compute resources, it will also orchestrate the analysis across different data provider sites both for structured and unstructured data.
+
+The use of standardized data and metadata formats across different data provider sites and cancers, such as the OMOP standard, together with the federated software stack for statistical analysis and federated learning can leverage the potential of evidence based decision making in clinics.
+
+The infrastructure depicted here is built upon HIFIS OpenStack and Kubernetes and provides a Jupyter hub for data analytics workflows. 
+For secure access and authorization we plan to use the Helmholtz AAI.
+
+## Repository and analytics platform on soil ecosystem and biodiversity data
+
+Soil is one of the critical ecosystems for the water cycle, CO2 cycle, biodiversity and agriculture. 
+CASUS is currently setting up infrastructure to provide long term, high quality data on soil data, including information on the ecosystem and biodiversity.
+
+This data is curated and spans over decades and, in some places, almost a century. 
+Such rich, high quality, long term data is central to better assess the long term development of soil quality, biodiversity and ecological richness as well as its role in the global water and CO2 cycle in the view of global change.
+
+The infrastructure that will be used for this project will built up on a very similar architecture as the medical application stack depecited above, again making use of the aforementioned HIFIS services.
+
+While the provision of such data is a big step by its own, leveraging synergies with other research disciplines in building trustworthy statistical and AI models for such rich and large data sets is an important step to understand the complexity and dynamics of the systems from which this data is collected.
+
+While this data analytics infrastructure is currently being built, a trustworthy, non-commercial, federated cloud infrastructure run by an internationally known and trusted entity is favoured by researchers, guideline organizations, clinics and pharma companies alike as the backbone for such an infrastructure. 
+Helmholtz and HIFIS are the ideal partners for providing such infrastructure across communities and country borders.
+
+## pic 2 / logo
+
+Secure and trusted data management and provision, a long-term commitment and the ability to scale such an architecture combined with decades of experience in providing research infrastructures to stakeholders from science to industry are key elements to the sustainability of such data platforms and the soft- and hardware infrastructure needed for them. 
+In Europe, only Helmholtz and HIFIS are able to provide this.
+
+While institutes and centres such as CASUS/HZDR can develop the specific research software stack needed for domain-specific data analytics platforms as they have the combined scientific domain and IT infrastructure expertise, the underlying cloud infrastructure is much better fitting to be provided as an overarching, common infrastructure by HIFIS that leverages the synergies in needing such infrastructures for many different cloud-based data repository and analytics infrastructures across scientific domains, centres and research fields.
+
+As such, we believe that creating and maintaining data repository and analytics services via the HIFIS infrastructure is a strong strategic decision that puts Helmholtz in the lead of providing soft- and hardware infrastructures for data-based research in Europe and worldwide.