Background The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged healthcare systems and research worldwide. Data is collected all over the world and needs to be integrated and made available to other researchers... Show moreBackground The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged healthcare systems and research worldwide. Data is collected all over the world and needs to be integrated and made available to other researchers quickly. However, the various heterogeneous information systems that are used in hospitals can result in fragmentation of health data over multiple data 'silos' that are not interoperable for analysis. Consequently, clinical observations in hospitalised patients are not prepared to be reused efficiently and timely. There is a need to adapt the research data management in hospitals to make COVID-19 observational patient data machine actionable, i.e. more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) for humans and machines. We therefore applied the FAIR principles in the hospital to make patient data more FAIR. Results In this paper, we present our FAIR approach to transform COVID-19 observational patient data collected in the hospital into machine actionable digital objects to answer medical doctors' research questions. With this objective, we conducted a coordinated FAIRification among stakeholders based on ontological models for data and metadata, and a FAIR based architecture that complements the existing data management. We applied FAIR Data Points for metadata exposure, turning investigational parameters into a FAIR dataset. We demonstrated that this dataset is machine actionable by means of three different computational activities: federated query of patient data along open existing knowledge sources across the world through the Semantic Web, implementing Web APIs for data query interoperability, and building applications on top of these FAIR patient data for FAIR data analytics in the hospital. Conclusions Our work demonstrates that a FAIR research data management plan based on ontological models for data and metadata, open Science, Semantic Web technologies, and FAIR Data Points is providing data infrastructure in the hospital for machine actionable FAIR Digital Objects. This FAIR data is prepared to be reused for federated analysis, linkable to other FAIR data such as Linked Open Data, and reusable to develop software applications on top of them for hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery. Show less
Recently, the topic of research data management has appeared at the forefront of Open Science as a prerequisite for preserving and disseminating research data efficiently. At the same time,... Show moreRecently, the topic of research data management has appeared at the forefront of Open Science as a prerequisite for preserving and disseminating research data efficiently. At the same time, scientific laboratories still rely upon digital files that are processed by experimenters to analyze and communicate laboratory results. In this study, we first apply a forensic process to investigate the information quality of digital evidence underlying published results. Furthermore, we use semiotics to describe the quality of information recovered from storage systems with laboratory forensics techniques. Next, we formulate laboratory analytics capabilities based on the results of the forensics analysis. Laboratory forensics and analytics form the basis of research data management. Finally, we propose a conceptual overview of open science readiness, which combines laboratory forensics techniques and laboratory analytics capabilities to help overcome research data management challenges in the near future. Show less
Recently, the topic of research data management has appeared at the forefront of Open Science as a prerequisite for preserving and disseminating research data efficiently. At the same time,... Show moreRecently, the topic of research data management has appeared at the forefront of Open Science as a prerequisite for preserving and disseminating research data efficiently. At the same time, scientific laboratories still rely upon digital files that are processed by experimenters to analyze and communicate laboratory results. In this study, we first apply a forensic process to investigate the information quality of digital evidence underlying published results. Furthermore, we use semiotics to describe the quality of information recovered from storage systems with laboratory forensics techniques. Next, we formulate laboratory analytics capabilities based on the results of the forensics analysis. Laboratory forensics and analytics form the basis of research data management. Finally, we propose a conceptual overview of open science readiness, which combines laboratory forensics techniques and laboratory analytics capabilities to help overcome research data management challenges in the near future. Show less
