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Meeting an NIH data management and sharing plan

Microscopy image from the NIH Image Gallery

This use case highlights ways research teams can leverage generalist repositories to share project data.

Dataset Details

Dataset title: HemOnc ontology, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FPO4HB

Investigators and affiliations: Jeremy Warner

  • HemOnc.org LLC
  • Brown University
  • Lifespan Cancer Institute

Data type: Ontology

Use case date: February 2, 2023

Use case contact: Julian Gautier, support@dataverse.harvard.edu

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Background

Jeremy Warner is co-founder of HemOnc.org LLC and has led the development and publication of the HemOnc knowledge base at HemOnc.org since it started in 2011.

HemOnc.org is hosted on a wiki, where healthcare professionals browse and contribute data for describing chemotherapy drugs and regimens. The knowledge base started as a volunteer effort before Jeremy secured NIH grants to maintain and expand it. A large subset of the knowledge base is used to create an ontology called HemOnc, expressed in standard formats (the Web Ontology Language and the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership common data model) so that other systems can use it, such as the ATHENA – OHDSI Vocabulary Repository.

Healthcare professionals use the ontology to describe clinical trials, ultimately enhancing the discoverability of clinical trials data and improving researchers' understanding of the impacts of cancer treatments.

Use case

In 2021, Jeremy and his group wanted to make the data easier to cite, preserve and track as it evolved. He remembered using the Harvard Dataverse Repository the previous year to fulfill a journal's data sharing requirements and decided to use the repository again, publishing a dataset in the Harvard Dataverse Repository and updating it four or more times a year with major versions of the ontology.

He likes that the repository makes it simple to get a persistent identifier for the dataset and how the repository's guestbook feature lets him track who accesses the data. He also appreciates that the repository's APIs allow others to "subscribe" to the data, automating regular updates into their workflows and systems.

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GREI Use Cases are supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Data Science Strategy / Office of the NIH Director pursuant to OTA-21-009, "Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI)".

Header image: NIH Image Gallery. GDF10 protein forms new brain cell connections (https://www.flickr.com/photos/nihgov/22798807131/). Courtesy of S. Thomas Carmichael, MD, PhD, David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles. NIH funding: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). More information at https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/scientists-identify-main-component-brain-repair-after-stroke