Result description
A cross-disciplinary resource that maps and interlinks databases, standards and policies, FAIRsharing enables efficient onboarding of new data sources and a means to ensure these are more discoverable in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) ecosystem.The collection contains over 20 data sources, developed by BY-COVID members, from social science and humanities, health and clinical data, images, genomic and phenotypic data and chemical biology.
Problem addressed
Making a range of infectious disease data sources widely discoverable, accessible and interoperable is important for research and innovation, which is increasingly multidisciplinary in nature. For example, pathogen research is accelerated by the availability of data from clinical trials, biobanks, behavioural and socioeconomic studies, particularly if the data is combined with host and pathogen omics information. Many of these data types, for example clinical records or bioactivity data, may contain high resolution images, the availability of which extends the potential research questions which can be explored.
Multidisciplinary data is also critical for public health decision-making, where policy questions are complex and evidence from biomolecular research, clinical studies and social sciences must be taken into account. One lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic was that data-driven decision-making needs high quality, real-time data from many research disciplines and geographic areas in an integrated format. The BY-COVID project is building on these learnings and creating solutions for COVID-19 that can be extended to other pathogens. Resources like the COVID-19 Data Portal and FAIRsharing are pivotal to meet these goals.
Who can use the result
Researchers needing access to reliable, curated pathogen data and wanting to build links across related data types. For example, these data sources enable datasets to be incorporated into the COVID-19 Data Portal, providing access to heterogeneous, yet interlinked and organised data, across domains. Over the course of the project, emerging national data portals will be registered in FAIRsharing and linked to the COVID-19 Data Platform, building a federated digital space for infectious disease data.Timeline
The initial FAIRsharing BY-COVID collection of data sources was created in Q1 2022, steadily grew in size and was launched in June 2023. It will remain a growing resource throughout the length of the BY-COVID project.How to use the result
Type of result
