Bridging the Terminology Gap: Building User-Friendly Tools for FAIR Data Creation

About This Grant

Project Summary The NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science emphasizes the need for scalable, standards-driven infrastructure to support effective biomedical data sharing. A central component of that infrastructure is high-quality metadata— structured, semantically consistent annotations that make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). While tools like the CEDAR Workbench and BioPortal have made it easier to use ontologies in metadata, a critical gap remains: the lack of robust infrastructure to manage the lifecycle of value sets, the curated collections of terms that underpin standardized metadata. This project will address that gap by building a general-purpose, modular infrastructure for value-set lifecycle management. The system will support value- set discovery, collaborative editing, validation, version tracking, and integration with ontology repositories. Designed for use across diverse NIH initiatives, the infrastructure will help ensure that metadata are consistent with domain standards, support reuse, and evolve reliably over time. By enabling researchers, curators, and informaticians to jointly create and manage reusable vocabularies, the new software will improve metadata quality and alignment with NIH data-sharing mandates. For metadata authors, it will streamline the process of defining terms that are semantically valid and contextually relevant. For repository users, it will enhance dataset comparability and enable better semantic search. For researchers seeking to reuse public data, it will reduce the need for manual harmonization and facilitate meaningful cross-study analysis. This work directly supports NIH’s vision of a connected, standards-based data ecosystem and advances the infrastructure needed to make that vision operational across the biomedical research landscape.