TREvolution Components
Five Safes RO-Crate
The Five Safes RO-Crate provides a consistent metadata framework for documenting sensitive research outputs. This enables interoperability between TREvolution products while preserving privacy and security.
Metadata is a set of identifiers that tells us important information about the nature of data (not the actual content of the data itself) for administrative purposes, such as its origin, who created it, when it was accessed, and for what purpose. Currently, metadata practices across Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are inconsistent, which limits the ability to track data, as well as interoperability between systems.
The Five Safes RO-Crate is a standardised metadata format designed to address this challenge, which describes research outputs in a clear, machine-readable manner. The Five Safes RO-Crate profile, as its name implies, builds further on RO-Crate (Research Object Crate) to meet the needs of TREs, particularly in handling sensitive data.
Within TREvolution, the Five Safes RO-Crate records important details about data generation and use (who, what, when, where, and why) to ensure transparency and reproducibility, particularly when data access is limited. It helps with auditing and validating research processes, building trust in research outcomes across different TREs.
As the metadata framework facilitating data handling across TREs, the Five Safes RO-Crate will be examined by all five DARE UK Early Adopters. The projects will provide feedback on the effectiveness of the Five Safes RO-Crate in documenting data workflows, facilitating TRE interoperability, and recording the origin of data accessed across real-world TREs for research purposes.
Project information
- Lead organisation: University of Manchester
- Partners/collaborators: Health Data Research UK, EOSC-ENTRUST, ELIXIR
- Duration: 23 months (March 2025 – February 2027)
- Product team contact email: ro-crate@researchobject.org
- Primary contact: Alexander Hambley (alexander.hambley@manchester.ac.uk)
Project team
- Stian Soiland Reyes – Project Co-Lead
- Carole Goble – Project Co-Lead
- Alexander Hambley – Senior Research Software Engineer
- Doug Lowe – Senior Research Software Engineer
- Eli Chadwick – Senior Research Software Engineer
- Oliver Woolland – Research Software Engineer
- Nick Juty – Senior Research Technical Manager
- Warren Del Pinto – Research Associate
Relevant links
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