Areas of focus
Each driver project will be focused on 1 of the following areas:
1. Trusted research environment (TRE) reference architecture
Applications for a short, targeted project focused on consolidating the existing work on TRE reference architectures, including example implementations, and co-developing with feedback from established stakeholders within the TRE community a composite reference architectures for TREs. The expected output would be a formal open source project to support collaborative longer term development.
2. Core federation services
Applications to establish an open-source project with the purpose of conceptualising, designing, structuring, and driving early development of a library of API services and micro-services as the beginning of a ‘federation layer’ of a network of trusted research environments in the UK. It is important to note that the focus in Phase 1b for this area is on establishing the development process and framework for the API library to allow for future delivery of the detailed services.
3. Federated identity management across TREs
Investigate and pilot an identity management service across 2 or more established trusted research environments, this should include:
- identifying and selecting the most suitable platform for such a service
- establishing an identity brokerage service as the integration partner across the different identity providers within each of the trusted research environments
- ensuring that testing and usage of such a service is possible in parallel with existing individual services provided by each involved trusted research environment
4. Partial automated risk assessment at data access request
Building on existing work in this area, investigate and advance a framework for the partial automation of risk assessment for sensitive data research projects at the data access request stage to pilot and test a consistent, efficient, and trustworthy approach (including tools) to risk assessment that can support existing data governance committee processes.
5. Partial automation of output control
Building on existing work in this area, investigate and advance a framework for automating components of the disclosure control process within trusted research environments to support a consistent, efficient, and trustworthy approach to the partial automation of output checking and disclosure control. This includes developing the tools necessary to underpin this to support manual review.
