“In a rapidly developing research-driven institute such as the Máxima, generated data grows in terms of size and complexity by the year. As a result, one of the biggest emerging infrastructural challenges of recent years is maintaining overview of what data is available – and where. This gave rise to the ambitious plan of setting up one central data station that strives to make our data more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), thereby enabling researchers – and caretakers – to efficiently explore the data we produce. With this data station, studies can be compared in a cross-departmental (and potentially even cross-institutional) fashion, which will not only allow to perform integrative analyses on the multitude of different types of data, but also strongly facilitates collaborations with other pediatric cancer institutes.
As member of the Data Ingestion Engine team, I am currently setting up a semantic model for the data station that fits to the Máxima’s infrastructure. I also work on the maintenance of this infrastructure, as well as on our in-house cBioportal platform, which allows researchers to do exploratory genetic analyses on sequencing data derived from samples in the Biobank.”