The Data Use Ontology to streamline responsible access to human biomedical datasets

Authors	LAWSON Jonathan CABILI Moran N KERRY Giselle BOUGHTWOOD Tiffany THOROGOOD Adrian ALPER Pinar BOWERS Sarion R BOYLES Rebecca R BROOKES Anthony J BRUSH Matthew BURDETT Tony CLISSOLD Hayley DONNELLY Stacey DYKE Stephanie O M FREEBERG Mallory A HAENDEL Melissa A HATA Chihiro HOLUB Petr JEANSON Francis JENE Aina KAWASHIMA Minae KAWASHIMA Shuichi KONOPKO Melissa KYOMUGISHA Irene LI Haoyuan LINDEN Mikael RODRIGUEZ Laura Lyman MORITA Mizuki MULDER Nicola MULLER Jean NAGAIE Satoshi NASIR Jamal OGISHIMA Soichi WANG Vivian Ota PAGLIONE Laura D PANDYA Ravi N PARKINSON Helen PHILIPPAKIS Anthony A PRASSER Fabian RAMBLA Jordi REINOLD Kathy RUSHTON Gregory A SALTZMAN Andrea SAUNDERS Gary SOFIA Heidi J SPALDING John D SWERTZ Morris A TULCHINSKY Ilia ESTHER J ENCKEVORT van VARMA Susheel VOISIN Craig YAMAMOTO Natsuko YAMASAKI Chisato ZASS Lyndon JAIME M AUVIL Guidry NYRÖNEN Tommi H COURTOT Mélanie
Year of publication	2021
Type	Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source	Cell Genomics
MU Faculty or unit	Institute of Computer Science
Citation
Web	ScienceDirect
Doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.xgen.2021.100028
Description	Human biomedical datasets that are critical for research and clinical studies to benefit human health also often contain sensitive or potentially identifying information of individual participants. Thus, care must be taken when they are processed and made available to comply with ethical and regulatory frameworks and informed consent data conditions. To enable and streamline data access for these biomedical datasets, the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Data Use and Researcher Identities (DURI) work stream developed and approved the Data Use Ontology (DUO) standard. DUO is a hierarchical vocabulary of human and machine-readable data use terms that consistently and unambiguously represents a dataset’s allowable data uses. DUO has been implemented by major international stakeholders such as the Broad and Sanger Institutes and is currently used in annotation of over 200,000 datasets worldwide. Using DUO in data management and access facilitates researchers’ discovery and access of relevant datasets. DUO annotations increase the FAIRness of datasets and support data linkages using common data use profiles when integrating the data for secondary analyses. DUO is implemented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and, to increase community awareness and engagement, hosted in an open, centralized GitHub repository. DUO, together with the GA4GH Passport standard, offers a new, efficient, and streamlined data authorization and access framework that has enabled increased sharing of biomedical datasets worldwide.