Zenith was an Inria project-team created in 2012 by Patrick Valduriez to deal with scientific data management. The team has formally ended in 2024, and a new team Iroko has been created by Florent Masseglia in 2025 to deal with data-intensive environmental sciences.
Zenith addressed the main challenges of scientific data management, which can be summarized by: (1) scale (big data, big applications); (2) complexity (uncertain, multi-scale data with lots of dimensions), and (3) heterogeneity (in particular, data semantics heterogeneity). These challenges are at the heart of data science, with the goal of making sense of data by combining data management, machine learning, statistics and other disciplines. Zenith came up with innovative solutions that provide significant advantages in terms of scalability, functionality, ease of use, and performance. To produce generic results, these solutions are in terms of architectures, models and algorithms that can be implemented in terms of components or services in specific computing environments, e.g. grid, cloud. We designed and validated our solutions by working closely with our scientific application partners such as INRAE and CIRAD in France, or FIOCRUZ and LNCC in Brazil.
