EOSC-Life Enhanced COVID-19 Portal and data mobilisation reporting

The overall objective of Work Package 13 is to deliver essential open data infrastructure to support urgent scientific research in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Including both the extension of existing infrastructure through software development and the operationalisation of this extended infrastructure through deep support services, the aim is to enable and empower a substantial research effort across European and global research communities. More specifically the objectives of WP13 are to:

1. Mobilise open biomolecular data relevant to COVID-19 research from structured bioinformatics databases and prioritised life science RI resources via the COVID-19 Data Portal
2. Mobilise new SARS-CoV-2 biomolecular data emerging from research laboratories, national public health organisations, EU, and global initiatives through the SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs to the COVID-19 Data Portal
3. Connect biomolecular data to sensitive contextual clinical and epidemiological data that lie within dispersed controlled access repositories, presenting these through the COVID-19 Data Portal

Progress on objectives: 1 and 2 are progressing well objective 3 is underway and we move forward, although data protection-related issues have presented challenges.

• Objective 1: over 5 million records from across EMBL-EBI resources are displayed on the portal, with many options for search and retrieval
• Objective 2: consensus sequence data from 101 countries, and raw sequencing read data coming in from 79 countries1. All public raw sequencing read data being analysed with custom workflows through the data hubs system
• Objective 3: a preliminary cohort browser application (developed under ReCoDID) has been adapted and made available for the purposes of the European COVID-19 Data Platform to allow browsing linked biomolecular and clin-epi data, based on simulated data. While the legal framework for harmonisation and linking of sensitive data continues to be developed, with a corresponding lack of data to show, this functionality is held ready for deployment in the COVID-19 Data Portal

Deliverable 13.1 set out for the COVID-19 Data Portal to be operating systematic data harvesting systems and tools to provide statistics from comprehensive EMBL-EBI data resources and tracking of growing data sets, offering tools and programmatic access having undergone User Experience testing.