Project Overview

Data generated by clinical research is collected and stored in a wide variety of different locations (e.g. data repositories, trial registries, publications, etc.). Because of the sensitivity of the data, data and related documents are often available under restricted or managed access.

To maximise the discoverability of all these data objects, it is necessary to collect the metadata about them, including object provenance, location and access details, into a single system.
To that end the XDC project will attempt develop an MDR (MetaData Repository) to standardise, assemble and display the metadata about clinical studies and the data objects generated by them, and provide access to them through a single system, accessed via a web portal.

The web portal is developed in collaboration with ONEDATA (see https://www.onedata.org/#/home) and INFN at Bologna (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare Sezione di Bologna, see http://www.bo.infn.it/). Development of the whole project has been within the H2020 project eXtreme - DataCloud (XDC) project, see http://www.extreme-datacloud.eu/the-project/) under grant agreement 777367.

Metadata from a variety of data sources have been collected by ECRIN using different modalities (e.g. DB download, OAI-PMH, scraping of web pages) and stored in a relational DB on the test bed server at INFN. Data is then exported as json file metadata to the OneData file management system and indexed via Elastic Search to make it available to the web portal.