TREvolution

Adopt standards

Standards already exist that can be used to build trust and enable federation. We are focused on adopting these standards rather than building our own.

See also:

Build Trust Enable Federation Accelerate Research

In technology, standards are used to promote interoperability, such that if your software or tool complies with a standard, it can be interchangeable. They are often the hidden glue that allows us to send money between banks, to use our mobile phone abroad or to access websites on the internet.

The key principle is that it does not matter if two people have chosen to place their money in different banks; they can still send money to each other. The same principle can apply to enabling a researcher to analyse data in more than one Trusted Research Environment (TRE). Standards can make that process much easier, without the researcher having to convert their analyses for each TRE.

Standards can also be used to give assurance that an entity is complying with an agreed baseline. These can be food hygiene, hotel ratings, or safety standards that can give us an indication of the level of service to expect. Within TREs, these standards can be how a TRE makes a decision about who to give access to the data, how it allows researchers to know the data it holds, or the security of their infrastructure. By demonstrating compliance with these standards, it can help to build trust between the public, researchers and regulators.

All the standards required already exist to tackle each individual challenge – they cover everything from technical requirements and security protocols to ethical principles and governance processes. However, they have not been brought together as a suite of standards to solve the challenge of accelerating research across TREs that hold sensitive data.

TREvolution will prove this is possible, and to do this, we must undertake pilots to demonstrate that these standards are suitable, relevant and appropriate to be used to enable federation (accessing or analysing data across multiple TREs). TREvolution is working with partners across the UK and internationally to explore and adopt standards that bring greater consistency and collaboration.

K8TRE

K8TRE integrates all the standards and efforts across TREvolution into a single product. It supports operations within and across TREs to tackle the challenge of running Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and a demonstrate for how the technology can all work together. K8TRE uses Kubernetes, an open-source platform, allowing TREs to function across public clouds, private clouds, or personal servers with slight modifications.

Through K8TRE, TREvolution will define a TRE platform that operates on multiple solutions, allowing future TRE developments to focus on a common framework. It offers a straightforward way for TRE organisations to set up a federated TRE without needing major changes to their current deployments, helping to lower governance costs and to demonstrate to TREs that adopting the standards is possible.

GA4GH standards – working with platform providers

There are multiple existing federated tooling and federated platforms that can provide the necessary functionality to accelerate research but currently many of these platforms do not use common standards making it harder to build trust with TREs.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) have many standards that can assist with moving analyses between environments. Our initial focus is on the standard developed by the GA4GH Cloud Work Stream, the Task Execution Service (TES) API as it provides a standard mechanism for orchestrating these complex analyses across different compute environments.

By working with existing platform providers we can promote the adoption of standards from GA4GH to make it easier to deploy and provide interoperability between platforms.

Adopting the FAIR principles

We are supporting the adoption of FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) through community engagement and targeted technical development.

Through the FAIR Community Forum, engagement sessions, and tailored Early Adopter meetings, we are working closely with stakeholders across the TRE ecosystem to elicit requirements, explore current practices, and demystify the FAIR principles. The principles help to improve transparency, build trust, and support reproducibility, and by aligning practices with FAIR, we can strengthen governance and accountability across TREs.

Our engagement work is paired with observing and documenting existing FAIR practices, co-creating RO-Crate profiles, and applying a ‘FAIRification’ framework to improve interoperability, transparency, and reproducibility across the Early Adopter projects and beyond. These activities are complemented by guidance, tooling, and dissemination through workshops and shared resources.

UPDATES

Latest news, events, and opportunities relevant to adopting standards.

EVENT

Drop-in session: DARE UK real-world research exemplars funding call (23 October 2025; 11-12pm)

23 Oct 2025

EVENT

Building collaborations for the DARE UK Research Exemplars funding opportunity (2 October 2025; 1:30-2:30pm)

2 Oct 2025

EVENT

Recap: Applicant webinar: DARE UK real-world research exemplars funding call (30 September 2025; 11-12pm)

30 Sep 2025

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Meet the Teams

Explore the teams focused on adopting standards.

ALL TEAMS

University of Nottingham

University of Dundee

University of Manchester

University College London

Lancaster University

Outputs

Discover TREvolution outputs relevant to adopting standards.

Latest

Media

An introduction to the general RO-Crate concepts through a running example, adding normative pages that define in more detail these and other concepts using separate examples and recommendations.

University of Manchester

Slides

A presentation providing an introduction to RO-Crate for members of the TREvolution project and the DARE UK Early Adopters.

University of Manchester

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