Prolonging the life of data

Research groups worldwide are collecting gigantic amounts of data on a daily basis. In many cases, the data are used in a single project and then end up in storage, never to be looked at again. For Prof. Reinhard Schneider, that is absurd. “If instead you share the data from different sources and aggregate them in new ways, you can gain entirely new insights from them,” says the head of the LCSB Bioinformatics Core. This opinion is shared by a growing number of researchers and research funders, resulting in the broad adoption of the FAIR principles: data ought to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Following suit, Luxembourg is currently setting up a platform that will allow professional storage and access to data according to unified standards.

The Luxembourg National Data Service (LNDS) is developed in collaboration with the LCSB. “We have gained a great deal of experience for a project of this nature through the ELIXIR programme,” Schneider says. “The LCSB has hosted the national Node for this European infrastructure since 2017 and we have set up a platform dedicated to biomedical data.” The LNDS will build on this expertise and expand the scope of activities with an interdisciplinary approach at the national level. The new service infrastructure will in fact benefit multiple areas including finance, materials research, physics and social sciences. “It will be a true added value for interdisciplinary topics,” says Schneider.

The LNDS was launched in 2022, with the support of six ministries and under the leadership of the Ministry of Research, giving the project a strong tailwind. Thanks to the expertise of the Bioinformatics Core and a good amount of strategic planning, the platform is becoming a reality. “We started by asking potential users what it is that they need, so that we could develop a concept relevant for all the national players,” explains Schneider. This includes the private sector, as the plan is to offer a variety of services for companies in addition to managing scientific data. The LNDS team also did some benchmarking, learning from infrastructures existing in other European countries such as Finland. Researchers will now focus on what is needed for data from their respective disciplines, ensuring that specialist expertise is present across the entire thematic range of the LNDS.

Indeed, it is not enough to be good at handling electronically stored information. “Only specialised scientists know how data are collected during an actual experiment and how they have to be prepared to be valuable for further use,” Schneider says. “Only they can properly curate the data and thus assure their quality.” Many legal aspects are to be taken into consideration as well. Medical data from drug development are for example subject to strict privacy regulations. They may only be reused for further research questions under very specific conditions. There, as well, the experience of the members of the Bioinformatics Core will be useful, as they have previously worked on ethical, legal and social implications linked to data sharing. “We have to respect all of these issues in establishing and operating the LNDS – so that the secondary use of data does indeed confer a true scientific benefit and an added value for Luxembourg as a whole,” concludes Schneider. ¢