Making Common Fund data more findable: catalyzing a data ecosystem
Amanda Charbonneau, Arthur Brady, Karl Czajkowski, Jain Aluvathingal, Saranya Canchi, Robert Carter, Kyle Chard, Daniel Clarke, Jonathan Crabtree, Heather H. Creasy, Mike D’Arcy, Victor Felix, Michelle Giglio, Alicia A. Gingrich, H. Harris, Theresa K. Hodges, Olukemi O. Ifeonu, Minji Jeon, Eryk Kropiwnicki, Marisa Lim, Lee Liming, Jessica Lumian, Anup Mahurkar, Meisha Mandal, James B. Munro, Suvarna Nadendla, Rudyard Richter, Cia Romano, Philippe Rocca‐Serra, Michael Schor, Robert Schuler, Hongsuda Tangmunarunkit, Alex Waldrop, Cris Williams, Karen R. Word, Susanna‐Assunta Sansone, Avi Ma’ayan, Rick Wagner, Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, C. Titus Brown, Owen White
Abstract
The Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) has created a flexible system of data federation that enables researchers to discover datasets from across the US National Institutes of Health Common Fund without requiring that data owners move, reformat, or rehost those data. This system is centered on a catalog that integrates detailed descriptions of biomedical datasets from individual Common Fund Programs' Data Coordination Centers (DCCs) into a uniform metadata model that can then be indexed and searched from a centralized portal. This Crosscut Metadata Model (C2M2) supports the wide variety of data types and metadata terms used by individual DCCs and can readily describe nearly all forms of biomedical research data. We detail its use to ingest and index data from 11 DCCs.