A metadata catalogue for child development cohorts: the Connecting Data in Child Development project

Over the course of decades, 6 longitudinal cohort studies previously united in the Consortium of Individual Development (CID; YOUth, L-CID, RADAR, TRAILS, Generation R, and NTR) have collected a wealth of multidisciplinary data, encompassing social, neural, psychiatric and physical development of thousands of children in the Netherlands. Due to their sensitivity, the collected data could not be made publicly available. In order to make the cohort data FAIR, a metadata catalogue and metadata schema were developed in the project “Connecting Data in Child Development” (CD2), which currently enlists over 1000 measures, and more to come. In this session, we demonstrated the catalogue and how it was created, highlighting both technical and community challenges.

Presentation given at the ODISSEI Conference on December 10th, 2024 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Acknowledgements

The catalogue was developed through intensive collaboration with researchers and data managers at all six participating cohort studies in the Netherlands (YOUth, L-CID, RADAR, TRAILS, Generation R, and NTR). While they were not present during this presentation, their contributions have been crucial for the creation of the catalogue. Their names can be found at the end of the presentation slides.

The catalogue was developed thanks to funding from Platform Digitale Infrastructuur Social Science and Humanities (PDI-SSH) in the Netherlands (2020).