The Data Coordinating Center for TCGA is responsible for accepting, validating, and provide all finalized data to the community through the data portal. Following the TCGA network Data Sharing Plan, data generated by TCGA components are deposited into public databases as soon as they were validated, in general within a few weeks of generation. The information generated by the TCGA Research Network is centrally managed to develop data standards and controlled vocabularies for each new technology, to establish an informatics infrastructure for data exchange between components of the project and a central repository, to create portals for basic and clinical researchers to easily access the data, and to encourage new computational approaches to analyze the data. Another key function of the bioinformatics component is to provide a secure network and means to protect the integrity and security of research and clinical data. All of the data generated have been made publicly available via tools and infrastructure that are compatible with the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG).
