Solutions

Database development, data law and ethics: 

Spokesperson Ritter/Charité has served in the leadership of IT infrastructure projects for the last decade, each involving the development of databases. 

Examples: 

• The Virtual Brain simulation platform with 40k software downloads and >150 publications using the platform; 
• the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) an operational GDPR-audited research infrastructure (RI) for sensitive data serving >20 large-scale projects by providing compute and storage resources, data discoverability via a graph data base, access to HPC and interfaces for data ingestion;
• EOSC project Virtual Brain Cloud funded with €15M establishing infrastructure for sensitive data
• Health Data Cloud of EBRAINS RI serving >5300 EBRAINS users; 
• eBRAIN-Health – a new Horizon Europe Infrastructure project that started on July 1st, 2022 – funded with €13M – to establish a federated RI for sensitive health data. 

Charité has strong dissemination activities related to ethics and legal aspects of RDM including e.g., 

• an EU Parliament Workshop on Digital Data for Dementia;
• GDPR Impact in Health Research Conference and publications on technical and organizational measures for RDM of sensitive health data. 

NFDI-Neuro partners hold similarly relevant activities on an international scale, e.g., EBRAINS AISBL leading the EU RI for Neuroscience EBRAINS in the ESFRI roadmap that ensures sustainability of EBRAINS RI for the upcoming decades. 

Generation of research data sets: 

• FZJ-led datasets.datalad.org provides access to distributed datasets across a wide range of repositories via DataLad. 
• Fraunhofer SCAI with ADataViewer provides access to >20 large-scale cohorts and >1200 mutually mapped data variables;
• LMU’s G-Node is providing GIN services for research dataset generation and publication, recommended by leading scientific journals (Nature, eLife, PLOS), with >200 published datasets;
• Participant EBRAINS provides access to >1000 curated data sets, models, tools discoverable via EBRAINS Knowledge Graph (KG). 

Data and metadata standards:  

• Charité leads the BIDS extension for Computational Modeling standard; 
• FZJ has been involved in the development of BIDS from its beginning and is contributing to 
  • BIDS for electrophysiology data, 
  • the Neo data model and
  • tools for the odML metadata standard. 
• FZJ leads the development of OpenMINDS schema used by hundreds of EU neuroscientists as indicated by >1793 contributors to the EBRAINS KG data collection all using this standard. 
• Fraunhofer SCAI brings expertise in mapping scientific knowledge into computable, multi-scale mechanistic KGs, harmonizing datasets, developing semantic frameworks, ontology lookup services and the Referential Ontology Hub for Applications within Neuroscience. 
• LMU has been leading the development of metadata format odML and the NIX data standard and has co-developed the Neo data object model. These data models are being used by thousands of users worldwide.