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FAIR Metroline – new and upcoming steps
Making health data FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable – is an important step towards building a connected and trustworthy data landscape for research and healthcare. Yet, putting the FAIR principles into practice can be challenging. The FAIR Metroline helps you navigate this process. The FAIR Metroline is part of the agreements concerning the national health data infrastructure and is available through the portal 'FAIR training and guidance' within the National Health Data Portal. FAIR training and guidance | National Health Data Portal directly available via FAIR Metroline.
It offers clear, practical guidance to support researchers and data holders in making their data FAIR step by step. Developed by experts from Health-RI and regional partners, and reviewed by external specialists, each page provides reliable, easy-to-follow information to guide you on your FAIR journey.
In 2026 FAIR Metroline and the Tool assemblies will be further integrated. We will be working on enhancing the user experience via, for example, user groups. Stay tuned for more updates in the future.
Help shape the FAIR Metroline
The FAIR Metroline is continuously evolving, and your input is essential to keep it relevant and practical. We invite everyone working with research or healthcare data to explore the steps, share feedback and help improve the guidance. Feedback can be submitted via the Quick feedback form , in a Word document, or by joining the Reviewing Group. All contributors will be acknowledged on the website.
If you are interested in contributing or have questions, please contact Mariska Steeghs (mariska.steeghs@health-ri.nl) or Sander de Ridder (sander.deridder@health-ri.nl).
Join the journey
Together we can make FAIR data practice more accessible, consistent and effective. Explore the FAIR Metroline, share your experience and help strengthen the foundation for an integrated national health data infrastructure.
We are pleased to announce that four new steps are now available on fairmetroline.org:
- Transform and expose FAIR (meta)data focuses on publishing your data in machine-readable formats through trusted channels.
- Design eCRF (data collection) guides the setup of electronic case report forms to collect data efficiently and accurately.
- Create or reuse a semantic (meta)data model encourages reuse of existing models where possible to enhance interoperability.
- Define access conditions helps data holders balance accessibility with privacy and ethical considerations.
In addition, three steps are now open for external review on the internal Health-RI Confluence:
- Data access and retrieval outlines how to responsibly identify, access and retrieve data so it is legally compliant, secure and trustworthy before being made FAIR.
- Use ontologies in the data model describes how to link data models to shared ontologies to make meanings explicit, machine interpretable and interoperable across systems in line with FAIR principles.
- Query (use) over resources explains how to discover, query and reuse FAIR data, progressing from simple browsing and filtering to advanced SPARQL and federated queries across multiple FAIR resources.
Feedback for these pages is welcome until 23 March 2026, after which we will resolve your comments and release their final versions. Your input will directly support the improvement of these pages before publication on the website.