The complex nature of cancer requires integration of advanced research data across national boundaries to enable progress in prevention of cancer and the development of optimal medical care. The European mission board for cancer has identified access to data, knowledge and digital services across European borders vital for the cancer mission. The goal in EOSC4Cancer is to make cancer-related genomic, imaging, clinical, environmental and socio-economics data accessible through the use and improvement of existing federated and interoperable systems. Curated and FAIR datasets will be essential for advanced analytics and computational methods, including machine learning, to be reproducible and robust.

EOSC4Cancer’s Work Package 1 is working to enhance access to cancer-related data by increasing the FAIRness of the participating resources by contributing data to the EOSC4Cancer metadata catalogue. The resources are data providers from within the consortium as well as institutes not involved in EOSC4Cancer. A directory for these resources was developed by adopting and enhancing the MOLGENIS Catalogue platform that is also used by other major EU projects and infrastructures. The mission of the MOLGENIS catalogue is to provide a sustainable ‘software as a service’ catalogue that allows projects to sustain their cataloguing results beyond project end-dates. It provides a framework to describe in detail: metadata of cohorts and of data sources; definitions of the variables collected in cohorts and data sources; and mappings to common data models.

EOSC4Cancer can be found on the MOLGENIS catalogue here as one of the networks.