Sub-institutions

Overview

Sub-institutions allow for additional layers of discovery and administration in an institutional context. For example, a university may exist as an institution, and then be composed of a number of sub-institutions, each representing a particular school (e.g., University School of Medicine).

This allows for end users to easily search for datasets and organization across your university, while also being able to drill down and search within a particular sub-institution. Importantly, each sub-institution is an isolated administrative context, with its own administrators, organizations, and billing.

Redivis supports arbitrary levels of sub-institution nesting. For example, you could have:

1. University (top institution)

2. University School of Medicine (sub-institution, under "University")

3. Surgery Department (sub-institution, under "School of Medicine")

Inheritance and visibility rules

As a rule of thumb, resources across sub-institutions will "roll up" within a discovery context, but operate independently in an administrative context.

When a user lands on the discovery page for the top-level university institution, they will be able to search across the datasets, organizations, etc. across that institution and all of its sub-institutions (recursively). In the example hierarchy above, this means datasets in the School of Medicine as well as the Surgery Department, as well as any datasets hosted directly by the top institution, would show up in search results. However, if a user navigates to the Surgery Department page, they'll only see datasets within that sub-institution.

However, when you're administering an institution, you will only see (and have access to) the resources directly under your institution. In our example above, an administrator of the University "top" institution would only see datasets within this institution's organizations, but not datasets hosted within the School of Medicine, etc.

There are two notable exceptions to the administrative isolation rules:

1. An institution administrator can manually make themselves an administrator of a sub-institution. Such action would be visible to all other administrators in that sub-institution, and requires explicit action on the part of the "parent" institution administrator.

2. Institutions can view high-level metrics that are aggregated across their institution and any sub-institutions. These metrics are the same as those presented on the institution admin dashboard, and show items such as total user counts, data stored, etc. These metrics cannot be filtered or otherwise broken out in any way — the common use case is to be able to see total Redivis metrics across a university.