Open Source Secure Data Infrastructure and Processes
Already very early on during the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for solid, data-driven decision was recognized. Please see the comprehensive OSSDIP Wiki for all available documentation. Alternatively, there is a compiled offline Wiki PDF version available which is occasionally updated.
Description
During meetings of the COVID-19 Future Operations Clearing Board, a national expert platform it became evident that access to essential data was missing. This was primarily due to the impossibility of Data Owner to share their data with experts, either due to privacy reasons (medical, social science), but also due to the massive risk involved in sharing commercially sensitive data. In order to break this deadlock, TU Wien within a timeframe of two weeks set up a high-security data infrastructure and according processes to allow data owners to provide:
- Highly selective access (data visiting),
- To specific (fine-granular or aggregated, fingerprinted) subsets of data,
- For identified individuals,
- For limited periods of time, and
- To answer precisely defined questions accepted by the Data Owner
Expertise
This infrastructure - and specifically its fast set-up and deployment to support the work of the COVID-19 Future Operations Board was possible as we could build on experience gained by operating a very similar infrastructure in the health care sectore for many years as part of the DEXHELPP project.
Project Goal
The goal of this project, is to clean up, document and enhance this infrastructure to provide a fully documented, entirely open-source based reference implementation of a secure data infrastructure (OSSDIP) supporting data visiting. This will allow institutions to quickly set-up and deploy a similar solution to provide access to their data. It addresses the RDA COVID-19 Recommendations, that:
Measures should be taken in order to organise the sharing of data and trial documents in a suitable, trustworthy and secure data repository, and provides some core functionality of the Safe Setting component of Trusted Research Environments as set out in the Green Paper of the UK Health Research Data Alliance.
It allows data not sharable via existing COVID-19 data portals to be used for analysis by enabling data owners to make their data visitable and usable in a fully controlled manner. It is thus meant to complement existing Open Data portals and support access to sensitive and not openly sharable data.
Acknowledgement
This project is supported by EOSC Secretariat in cooperation with COVID-19 Future Operations. We thank Martin Weise for the automatization of the project which greatly improves the flexibility, overall infrastructure testing, set-up of the repository and documentation of the project.
Special thanks go to:
- the team of the Coordination and Communications team (ZKK) at the Faculty of Informatics of TU Wien,
- the team operating the DEXHELPP infrastructure, as well as
- numerous experts contributing to the discussion and design of this infrastructure, at TU Wien, SBA-Research and several other institutions, as well as to
- the EOSC-Secretariat project for its support under the Co-Creation programme (call H2020-INFRAEOSC-05-2018-2019, grant agreement number 831644)
- the EOSC-Life project for its supported under the Digital Life Sciences Open Call (call EH2020-INFRAEOSC-05-2018-201, grant agreement number 824087)
- and the Austrian COVID19 Future Operations board
Contributors (alphabetic)
- Tobias Grantner
- Michael Hörmanseder
- Geoffrey Karnbach
- Filip Kovacevic
- Tanja Sarcevic
- Martin Weise
Please contact Ao.Univ.Prof. Andreas Rauber via email.
Vienna University of Technology
Institute of Information Systems Engineering
Information and Software Engineering Group