Serena Defina
Erasmus MC
Fellowship project title: GuRu: A searchable data dictionary for the Generation R study
The goal: Building a user-friendly data dictionary web app for epidemiological and bio-medical researchers.
The why: Generation R is an ongoing population study including ~10.000 children born in Rotterdam between 2002 and 2005. Over the past 20 years, a vast amount of data was gathered from these children and their parents, including questionnaire reports, physical examinations, biological samples, neuroimaging, and more, making for an amazing resource for epidemiological and bio-medical research. However, the lack of a centralized, metadata-based querying tool makes it hard to explore this resource for researchers within the institution and across the world, who may be interested in leveraging this data to answer scientific questions. We plan to build a searchable data dictionary application (“GuRu”) that aims at providing easy access to information about: what data is available, when and how was it measured, and how to access it. This will hopefully not only save valuable time but also actively promote open science practices in the institution.
