Storing, managing, standardizing and publishing the vast amounts of data produced by biomedical research is a critical mission for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH Common Fund supports a wide variety of programs in their efforts to address emerging scientific opportunities and pressing challenges in biomedical research.
The Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) is an effort to identify and solve issues that inhibit data access and reuse across NIH Common Fund programs. The ultimate goal of the CFDE is for Common Fund data to be more usable and useful both within a single program and among data sets from multiple programs. By connecting the data sets and making them more accessible, the CFDE is intended to enable novel scientific research that was not possible before, including hypothesis generation, discovery, and validation.