MOLGENIS catalogue - towards a unified
                    application for data and sample catalogues

                            Alexander Kellmann[0000−0001−6108−5552] , David van
                               [0000−0002−2440−3993]
                  Enckevort                    , Marije van der Geest[0000−0002−1919−6547] ,
                                  [0000−0002−2924−918X]
                 Aneas Hodselmans                       , MOLGENIS Team, and Morris A.
                                        Swertz[0000−0002−0979−3401]

                             Genomics Coordination Center, Department of Genetics,
                         University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
                           {a.j.kellmann, m.a.van.der.geest, m.a.swertz}@umcg.nl
                                   {a.w.hodselmans, d.van.enckevort}@rug.nl
                                    https://www.systemsgenetics.nl/group/swertz



                      Abstract. To implement the ‘Findability’ of ‘FAIR’, many are now cre-
                      ating catalogues to promote reuse of valuable data and samples. However,
                      isolated development of these different catalogues is a large burden and
                      hinders interoperability to pool information together in more compre-
                      hensive catalogues. Therefore we compared existing models from many
                      different sources and present MOLGENIS/catalogue, a unified catalogue
                      application that generalizes best practices from many biobank, popu-
                      lation, (rare) disease, and cohort catalogue communities, e.g. BBMRI,
                      RD-connect, LifeCycle, Lifelines, Maelstrom. The resulting model seeks
                      to provide an extensible model to quickly create a new catalogue based
                      on the MOLGENIS software.

                      Keywords: FAIR · Molgenis · Catalogue · Biobanks · Cohort studies


             1     Materials & Methods

             We compared catalogue data models from many existing initiatives and stan-
             dards (MIABIS) and consulted our many stakeholder projects to identify com-
             mon data structures and elements. Then we implemented a unified but modular
             data model to accommodate the needs of different communities using MOLGE-
             NIS software suite, optimised for flexible data models and independent devel-
             opment of web user interface ‘apps’, to allow ‘agile development’ with frequent
             releases.


             2     Results

             A first version of the unified catalogue data model has been created for evalu-
             ation. In addition we have defined a list of user requirements, based on broad
             community consultation. This ‘backlog of user stories’ is now being prioritized by




Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
2       M. Swertz et al.

the stakeholders to create a community supported roadmap for implementation.
We designed MOLGENIS/catalogue to be highly configurable and extensible
to attract community contributions in data model extensions, tools and user in-
terfaces. An online Demo of the MOLGENIS catalogue model can be found here:

https://testmodel.test.molgenis.org
user: demo
password: Feedback



3   Conclusions
We believe that focus of efforts into one unified catalogue application will greatly
improve development speed and promote interoperability, and invite the biobank
community to feedback and steer its development to meet all their needs. This
will help us, to make the model even more useful. We’re working with various
semantic communities, such as SWAT4HCLS, CINECA, EJP-RD, to improve
the semantic enrichment and make cross domain federated searches a reality.