This proposal will expand and leverage NIA's investment, as part of NIH's Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, in the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF;http://neuinfo.org) to create an Aging Integrative Platform Pilot. NIF is a unique resource where diverse biomedical data (i.e. behavioral, clinical, genetic, imaging, etc.), and resources are concurrently available through a semantic search and knowledge environment. The current NIF data federation searches over 350 million data records, in over 110 databases, with new databases being aligned and added weekly through the use of curation assistance tools. NIF has gained extensive experience in understanding the requirements to maximize the value of diverse data through the application of uniform curation standards and links to our ontologies. Through its investment in NIF, NIA has a cost-effective platform available with an experienced curation team to provide a data extraction and data archiving platform for its assets and aging related assets in general. This directly addresses one of the purposes of the RFA, namely the """"""""archiving and dissemination of data sets to enable secondary analyses in order to further advance research"""""""". The current NIF provides a discovery portal geared towards neuroscience;however, its underlying system is generic and can be easily adapted to provide specialized views for different communities. Under this proposal, we will accelerate the integration of NIA-relevant data resources and use these as the driver to provide a search portal and knowledge environment that is specifically geared towards aging. The data sets assimilated into this pilot will be usable as part of the overall NIF system, available through web services, linked open data and services to link data to the literature, without additional work as NIF already adds these services to each federated data set. Once integrated within the NIF, these resources become known and usable to a much wider array of researchers.
This application directly addresses the urgent need for the development of efficient capabilities for integration of and computation on biomedical, sociobehavioral and clinical data by providing a knowledge environment which provides the necessary infrastructure to take full advantage of existing datasets. This proposal focuses on the archiving and dissemination of data sets to enable secondary analyses thereby further advancing research and meeting NIH's goal of seamless exchange of resources to promote knowledge discovery.
