Components: This Other Transactions Research Opportunity Announcement (OT ROA) is to support the NIH Cloud Platform Interoperability program (NCPI) and complements investments by NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices (ICOs) in secure cloud-based platforms for data storage, sharing, and analysis. This research opportunity will be administered by the Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS).
Research Opportunity Purpose: The purpose of this announcement is to invite applications from eligible organizations to engage with the NIH in providing technical, administrative, and coordination support for the NIH Cloud Platform Interoperability program (NCPI). The goal of NCPI is to enable a federated data ecosystem that will facilitate researcher-driven analyses of datasets across multiple cloud-based platforms and repositories. This will be accomplished through testing and implementing standards and approaches for systems interoperability and universal authentication. Current efforts are driven by key scientific data interoperability projects that cut across the Analysis Visualization and Informatics Lab-space (AnVIL) supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI); BioData Catalyst supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI); the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI); the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center (DRC) supported by the NIH Common Fund; and the NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Each of these systems are made up of portals or interfaces for searching datasets, repositories for storing and distributing data, and cloud compute platforms that provide private workspaces where researchers can collaborate and run a variety of analysis tools and workflows. Empowering researchers to rapidly and seamlessly co-analyze data from these systems will accelerate biomedical research in pursuit of improving public health. This announcement aims to establish the NCPI Administrative Coordination Center (ACC), which will provide technical, administrative, coordination, and project management support across NCPI participants and collaborators. The primary responsibility of the ACC will be to support the NIH in identifying, prioritizing, and overseeing interoperability projects, which are technical projects that are driven by scientific use cases that leverage datasets from multiple NIH cloud repositories. These interoperability projects should result in the development and/or adoption of foundational technical tools or approaches for an extensible, connected data ecosystem, and ultimately lead to improved findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reproducibility (FAIRness) of data. Additionally, the ACC will have wide-ranging responsibilities that include supporting of the creation and maintenance of communication and training materials, organizing and facilitating events related to NCPI activities, providing project management for NCPI interoperability projects and working groups, monitoring of progress and milestones, supporting the NIH in developing good governance practices, and supporting the onboarding of new partner platforms.
Access the full 25-page document here.
Source: Research Opportunity Title: NIH Cloud Platform Interoperability Administrative Coordinating Center – March 16, 2022. NIH.
