NCATS Biomedical Data Translator
Description
Clinical, biomedical, and translational science has reached an inflection point in the breadth and diversity of available data and the potential impact of such data to improve human health and well-being. However, the data are often siloed, disorganized, and not broadly accessible due to discipline-specific differences in terminology and representation. To address these challenges, NCATS ahs formed the Biomedical Data Translator Consortium, a diverse community of nearly 200 basic and clinical scientists, informaticians, ontologists, software developers, and practicing clinicians distributed over 11 teams and 28 institutions. The consortium has developed and tested a pilot knowledge graph-based “Translator” system capable of integrating existing biomedical data sets and “translating” those data into insights intended to augment human reasoning and accelerate translational science. Having demonstrated feasibility of the Translator system, the Translator program has since moved into development, and the Translator Consortium has made significant progress in the research, design, and implementation of an operational system.
RENCI's Role
RENCI plays a major role in the Translator Consortium, leading 3 of the 11 Translator projects.
- Exposures Provider integrates health and environmental data to create the tool ICEES, which exposes this data using a novel privacy-preserving mechanism.
- Ranking Agent has created ARAGORN, a reasoning tool that queries knowledge sources to provide creative answers to user-based questions.
- Standards and Reference Implementations provides the technical glue for the Translator consortium, supporting shared decision making, community standards for data and APIs, and shared tools.
