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Finding useful data across multiple biomedical data repositories using DataMed

Abstract

The value of broadening searches for data across multiple repositories has been identified by the biomedical research community. As part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge initiative, we work with an international community of researchers, service providers and knowledge experts to develop and test a data index and search engine, which are based on metadata extracted from various data sets in a range of repositories. DataMed is designed to be, for data, what PubMed has been for the scientific literature. DataMed supports the findability and accessibility of data sets. These characteristics—along with interoperability and reusability—compose the four FAIR principles to facilitate knowledge discovery in today's big data–intensive science landscape.

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Figure 1: Data sources have various metadata specifications, which undergo ingestion into the common DATS model, whose metadata elements are used for indexing and DataMed searches.
Figure 2: Community input to the Data Discovery Index Consortium.

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Acknowledgements

This project is funded by grant U24AI117966 from NIAID, NIH, as part of the BD2K program. The co-authors, who are the lead investigators and chairs/co-chairs of the core activities, thank all contributors to the bioCADDIE consortium and list them in the Supplementary Note in alphabetical order within each activity group (each name appears only once even though many people participated in different activities).

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Correspondence to Lucila Ohno-Machado.

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Ohno-Machado, L., Sansone, SA., Alter, G. et al. Finding useful data across multiple biomedical data repositories using DataMed. Nat Genet 49, 816–819 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3864

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