The NIMH Data Infrastructures

The National Institute of Mental Health has created a flexible infrastructure to share data from human subjects collected in multiple research laboratories.  The infrastructure has two organizing principles:  a global unique identifier which allows data on the same subject to be aggregated without passing personally identifiable information between research laboratories and an extensive set of data dictionaries that allow researchers to describe the way an experiment was conducted.  Subsequent curation of the data in data dictionaries allows useful queries to be submitted.  The data infrastructure also provides deep federation with some existing external databases so that those queries can be launched against all of those databases simultaneously.  Additional development is beginning on extending this data infrastructure to provide useful ways to query data from mental health services research and to provide linkages to large-scale patient self report data infrastructures.