The data management approach of the CCNMD is a two tiered plan. Tier one, is to continue to implement a data warehouse system that has recently been developed within the Department of Psychiatry center-wide. Implementation of this system is in progress and provides access to the contributing projects within the CCNMD system integrated data storage and data query capacity immediately. All of the data tables generated by the Brain Bank Core and the Clinical Core during the past 18 years have been integrated into this browser based data warehouse. These data sets are available for interrogation and mining to all CCNMD participants through a secure intranet. Tier two, involves the upgrading of the currently implemented solution to a much more robust and universal data warehouse system with the help of IBM's """"""""Computational Biology Center, Exploratory Server Systems"""""""" that can serve a broader need and set of projects with greater sophistication, security, and universality complying with all existing standards for data security and medical data informatics. Tier one implementation will help ongoing data acquisition and data processing and tier two implementation will achieve unparalleled data integration, security, and data mining capabilities. All of the CCNMD projects will also require considerable statistical data analysis, and because of the complexity of some of the hypotheses addressed a high level of statistical analytic sophistication. While all of the CCNMD investigators are well versed in the statistical approaches that are applicable to their specific hypotheses and projects, this core will provide them with statistical expertise for not only state-of-the-art analysis of their specific data sets, but also for the integration of each projects data with the data derived from the other projects. The integration of cross-project data for statistical analysis will not only be aided by the data management system described, but also by the fact that statistical testing of hypotheses has been an integral part of the development of the aims and hypotheses of each CCNMD project form the time of their inception.
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