About the NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal

Metadata-driven data discovery for infectious and immune-mediated disease research #

The NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal enables users to find datasets from a wide range of biomedical research repositories and offers a convenient one-stop-shop for discovering data on infectious and immune-mediated diseases. It indexes metadata from multiple NIH-funded and generalist repositories, allowing users to search across millions of datasets from one location.

Data access through repositories #

Rather than storing the data itself, the Discovery Portal provides metadata-driven access—offering direct links to the original dataset landing pages hosted by their respective repositories. This makes it easy to explore and access datasets across diverse platforms without needing to visit each one individually.

The Discovery Portal can be used to:

• Search across millions of datasets from numerous sources to find datasets relevant to specific diseases, pathogens, study designs, or data types
• Identify new datasets to enhance analyses with underused or previously unknown data
• Download metadata or access it programmatically through the Portal’s API.
• Track research across NIAID-funded programs or specific scientific areas

Interpret search results carefully #

• The Discovery Portal does not aggregate every dataset from every source related to IID. The Discovery Portal collects metadata from a defined list of data repositories and standardizes them according to our metadata schema. The list is continuously updated. Anyone is welcome to suggest a data repository here.

• Results may include irrelevant datasets. The Discovery Portal also collects metadata from generalist repositories and search results may include datasets that are not related to IIDs.

• Metadata fields may be incomplete. The Discovery Portal attempts to standardize metadata that is made available by data repositories. If metadata from the repositories is missing or incomplete, it will also be missing or incomplete within the Discovery Portal. NIAID is working with the community to improve the completeness, quality, and consistency of metadata, in accordance with the FAIR Guiding Principles.

Partnership #

The development of NIAID Data Ecosystem involves a large number of partners, including numerous data repositories who host the data and provide metadata. The Discovery Portal is being developed by Scripps Research in collaboration with NIAID. NIAID is also working with partners across NIH, the US Government, and beyond to align the architecture and vision of the NIAID Ecosystem with similar systems elsewhere. The NIAID Data Ecosystem is in early stages of development and the partnerships will continue to expand as we continue to improve the capabilities and value of the Ecosystem to the research community.

For more information, visit Frequently Asked Questions.

Contact Us #

To provide feedback or ask additional questions, contact us at NIAIDDataEcosystem@mail.nih.gov.