Welcome to the Pennsieve Documentation Hub. Within these pages, you will be able to find information about the functionality of the platform, information about our client tools, and in-depth developer and API Documentation.

What is the Pennsieve Platform?

The Pennsieve platform is a cloud-based scientific data management platform focused on integrating complex datasets, fostering collaboration and publishing scientific data according to all FAIR principles of data sharing.

The platform is developed to enable individual labs, consortiums, or inter-institutional projects to manage, share and curate data in a secure cloud-based environment and to integrate complex metadata associated with scientific files into a high-quality interconnected data ecosystem. The platform is used as the backend for a number of public repositories including the NIH SPARC Portal and Pennsieve Discover repositories. It supports flexible metadata schemas and a large number of scientific file-formats and modalities.

In addition, the platform provides fully integrated mechanisms to publish datasets to make them publicly available, version snapshots of dataset, and enable investigators to cite datasets in publications. Our publishing mechanisms include multiple steps to ensure the resulting published data is highly visible, has complete meta-data and adheres to all NIH and FAIR requirements for data sharing.

Background

The Pennsieve platform has been developed over the last five years at Blackfynn Inc. In early 2021, Blackfynn decided to make the entire platform open source, and the development and management of the platform moved to the University of Pennsylvania where it is currently actively being maintained as part of the Institute of Biomedical Informatics and the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics.