Architecture & IT community projects

Virtual research environment

A virtual research environment (VRE) includes some crucial building blocks

• facilities to collect research data in one place
• and combine it with other data sources,
• access the data from various locations,
• use analysis tools and compute power,
• collaborate with colleagues around the world,
• comply with laws and regulations
• store the data safely while deciding who has access.

Each organization has developed its own IT solutions for these building blocks and these are often not compatible. By harmonizing the architecture of these facilities across institutions, we can ensure that they apply the same guidelines and standards, so that the solutions will become compatible. As a result, it will be much easier to collaborate and share health data.

An example of the actual implementation of the theoretical architecture is the Digital Research Environment (DRE) that was developed at Radboudumc. This is currently taken to the next level by the anDREa consortium that is promoting the concept of the DRE.

At the same time, SURF has initiated a VRE Architecture working/expert group that brings together knowledge and expertise from the UMCs, universities, and other knowledge institutes that all have expressed the need for a reference architecture on VREs.

Sharing observational COVID-19 patient data

Each hospital in the Netherlands collects observational COVID-19 patient data. It is technically challenging to combine these data. The NFU has recently launched the request to set-up a COVID-19 observational Data Platform that initially brings together metadata of observational COVID-19 data, helping researchers to easily locate, search, access or request COVID-19 data of interest. The main idea behind this request is that the data will stay at the source (i.e., a hospital or a central data capturing environment) and can be searched, accessed or requested from one single health data portal (e.g., a website). Setting up such a national health data portal is an effort that involves multiple Health-RI communities. Together with the ELSI community we collaborate on the set-up of a national COVID-19 citizen control registry ‘zeggenschapsregister’. To start off, we investigate existing best practices like the donor registry to see whether this ‘zeggenschapsregister’ could become part of it instead of yet another registration portal.

HORA

The Architecture & IT community is involved in HORA (‘hoger onderwijs referentie architecture’) as well as HOSA (‘hoger onderwijs sector architecture‘). This is a collection of instruments for organizing the information management of Dutch higher education institutions, in which SURF is heavily involved. All the achievements of the community so far have been integrated in the latest version of the HORA