NCI Cancer Research Data Commons: Core Standards and Services

Abstract

The NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) is a collection of data commons, analysis platforms, and tools that make existing cancer data more findable and accessible by the cancer research community. In practice, the two biggest hurdles to finding and using data for discovery are the wide variety of models and ontologies used to describe data, and the dispersed storage of that data. Here, we outline core CRDC services to aggregate descriptive information from multiple studies for findability via a single interface and to provide a single access method that spans multiple data commons. See related articles by Wang et al., p. 1388, Pot et al., p. 1396, and Kim et al., p. 1404.

Figure 1.

NCI CRDC Core Standards and Services. Researchers submitting research results to CRDC are encouraged to use terminologies and ontologies provided by DSS. Each data commons is routinely indexed by both CDA and DCF. Researchers looking for data will query against the database of aggregated indices built by CDA, using the cda-python tool. Query results include a unique persistent identifier for each file, provided by DCF, which also manages authentication and authorization for controlled data.