Research

CEDAR is funded as a research project. From its beginning it is dedicated to serving the research community, and collecting information and conducting research about its own development. 

We will collaborate closely with peers in the biomedical research community to make CEDAR as valuable to them as possible. At the same time, we intend to instrument our deployed software so that we can monitor its performance, and its satisfaction of the project's research goals. 

Even further, as we develop CEDAR, we will seek out opportunities to systematic the research capabilities that emerge from our architecture, and make them available to a wider community.

Last Updated: 
Sep 25 2020 - 11:14am
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Analytics Driving CEDAR

To make useful suggestions for metadata authors, CEDAR must anticipate their intentions, and make it easier for them to perform their tasks. The CEDAR project uniquely invests in analytics research, and especially focuses on evaluating the application of those research results to actual metadata entry in the real world. CEDAR’s success depends on the identification and application of patterns and relations in existing metadata, and we will be evaluating our success across many axes.

CEDAR Research Products

CEDAR aims to accelerate biomedical research by improving its metadata. CEDAR plans not only to make biomedical metadata better, but also to make creating it easier and faster. Better metadata will improve our ability to understand and replicate studies, improve discovery of relevant studies, and improve interoperability of study data across repositories and analytical systems.

CEDAR’s resulting collection of metadata, that CEDAR has aligned using its study models and specifications, will also create direct opportunities for biomedical research. The collection will make it faster and easier to explore simple questions and hypotheses, and will enable users to discover studies using a common model for metadata access. Here we describe how the metadata pipeline turns into better, and newly possible, research products.

Evaluating CEDAR Effectiveness

The CEDAR proposal calls for a wide range of evaluation criteria for the CEDAR project. These criteria assess both the value of CEDAR’s recommendations and capabilities to users, and the usefulness and viability of the CEDAR project and software as a whole.

The CEDAR team will use various evaluation techniques, including data analysis of the resulting metadata, user experience evaluation, community evaluations, and adoption and access metrics. Objective evaluation will be aided by instrumentation of the CEDAR software throughout the life of the project, allowing ongoing data collection and cross-version comparisons.

The CEDAR project will focus at first on ImmPort and HIPC communities, which as members of the CEDAR team will work with us to identify issues and improve the system. As we gain experience, we will work with other BD2K centers and projects, and open our processes to the wider biomedical community.