CINECA is structured into seven technical Work Packages, of which five will coordinate to build a unified platform for cohort level federated genetic discovery and analysis:

  • WP1 (Federated Data Discovery and Querying) interconnections with WP2, 3, 4, 5. WP1 will utilise the AAI services provided by WP2 through ELIXIR (Europe) and CanDIG (Canada) infrastructures. WP1 will use the phenotype semantic harmonisation from WP3 as the basis for carrying out federated phenotype driven data discovery. WP1 partners will implement the handoff service to transition from the discovery service (WP1) to doing federated analysis (WP4) on discovered cohorts. For more information about the work being done in WP1 go to the WP1 page here.

Overview of the workflow for CINECA

Overview of the workflow for CINECA

  • WP2 (Interoperable Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure) interconnections with WP1, 4, 5. The AAI services provided by WP2 via the ELIXIR and CanDIG AAI service will ensure that all requests for cohort data for discovery (WP1), federated analysis (WP4), and clinical applications (WP5) are correctly authenticated and authorised. Importantly WP2 will provide AAI interoperability between Canada, Europe, and Africa cohort infrastructures and researchers.

  • WP3 (Cohort Level Metadata Representation) interconnections with WP1, 4, 5. The cross cohort harmonised metadata and machine readable data use ontologies will be used by WP1 to provide structured data discovery services across the federated cohort network.

  • WP4 (Federated Joint Cohort Analysis) interconnections with WP1, 2, 3. WP4 will draw upon the cumulative services of almost all of the other WPs, e.g. data discovery (WP1), researcher AAI (WP2), and harmonised metadata (WP3) to form the input for the federated analysis applications. When data analysis is complete it will be submitted to EGA for data sharing, prior to this it will be available within the consortium as a series of shared, cloud based workflows, hosted on the EMBL-EBI Embassy cloud.

  • WP5 (Healthcare Interoperability and Clinical Applications) interconnections with WP1, 2, 3, 4. WP5 will build clinical applications and tools that will use the services from all of the technical work packages (WP1-4) and the ELSI framework (WP7) and data sharing model (WP4).

  • WP6 (Outreach Dissemination and Training) interconnections with WP 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Develop and deliver training (or other learning interventions e.g. secondments; communities of practice; hackathons) that integrate the outputs of the technical work packages to deliver the project’s training goals.

  • WP7 (Ethical and legal governance framework for transnational data-sharing) interconnections with WP1, 2, 5, 6. WP7 will collaborate in particular with WP1 (Federated data discovery and querying), WP2 (Researcher identities and authorisations as personal data under EU GDPR and Canadian Privacy Act and PIPEDA, and the provincial variants FOIPPA and FIPPA) to analyse the landscape of ethical and legal policies and their implications for intensified inter-continental data sharing between Europe, Canada, and Africa.