Susana Tomasio, Senior Application Scientist at Collaborative Drug Discovery CDD Vault outlined how CDD Vault supports FAIR (Findable Accessible, Interoperable Reusable) data management in research environments. The main emphasis was on the importance of open metadata for reproducibility. There was focus on both asset and assay registration for standardising and organising data.
It is well documented that the main challenges with data in the research environment are data siloes which result from departments working in compartments and developing their own unique systems and data. Limited knowledge exchange and collaboration exacerbates these challenges further according to Tomasio.
Assets refer to chemical structure such as molecules, protein sequences, cell lines and antibodies. Tomasio outlined how users can register these assets in CDD Vault and added that metadata fields are configurable by a vault administrator, a super user within an account that can create field or attributes depending on what information the end user needs to store. All in all, the systems allows for structured storage and querying of assets.
Meanwhile, assay registration requires storing assay data in protocols, which define how the data is processed. Then protocol fields and run fields capture metadata and experimental notes. CDD also uses ontology templates from organisations like the Pistoia Alliance as a way of standardising terminology. This protocol assists with avoiding duplication and ensures consistency across assays, making it easier for scientists to accurately describe experiments.
Tomasio covered the multitude of additional functionalities on offer such as the ELNs, Visualisation tools, sample inventory system, and RESTful API. In a nutshell, CDD Vault enables collaboration both internally and externally through project-based access controls, ensuring data security and selective sharing.
