Launching the GHGA Metadata Catalog

GHGA made an important step towards its goal of developing a national infrastructure to enable the FAIR sharing of genetic and other human omics data for secondary research. 

As the first phase of the project, we are launching GHGA Metadata Catalog: a public frontend for the discovery of study data from German research institutions. Within this preliminary “Catalog Phase” of the project, we are demonstrating and testing functionalities such as the search of non-personal metadata. The GHGA Metadata Catalog aims to create a resource to collect information on human omics datasets available from German institutions for secondary research under controlled access conditions. The first data sets discoverable are 62 WES/WGS and RNA sequencing data sets of 1310 patients suffering from 20 different rare cancer types from the NCT/DKFZ/DKTK MASTER program. 

The datasets within GHGA Metadata Catalog are annotated following the GHGA Metadata Model, which is aligned with the existing EGA scheme. If interesting datasets have been identified, researchers can contact the data controllers using the displayed contact information for the dataset’s Data Access Committee (DAC). If access requests are approved by the controller, the data will be made available via resources outside of GHGA, e.g. via the EGA or other existing resources.

In the next phase of the GHGA project, the Archive Phase, in addition to the display of public metadata describing the actual omics research data, GHGA will also store the omics data and make it available  to other researchers after approval by the DAC of the controller. 

More information on GHAG Metadata Catalog here: https://catalog.ghga.de