The EJP RD Virtual Platform
The EJP RD Virtual Platform network is an ecosystem of data resources and services related to rare diseases, that allows researchers and other stakeholders to easily find, access, and use data for different purposes, such as discovering and analysing it. To be part of this ecosystem, resources need to implement specifications [link] that make them ‘Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) for humans and machines’. We call those resources ‘VP compliant’. This compliance varies depending on the features that the resources’ controllers wish to provide. The more specifications a resource implements, the larger the contribution and empowerment to the functionality of the VP, and to research benefiting the rare disease community.
The VP network is designed so that a user, or an algorithm on behalf of a user, does not need previous knowledge of where data is. This means that data can be automatically found by machines, without the need to include explicit references to data in the algorithm code. Additionally, the user or the algorithm does not need to know the resource content beforehand, because FAIR data should be inherently interpretable by machines. Moreover, users and algorithms should not have to worry about incompatibilities between the resources or accidentally using data without permission. This is made possible by the interoperability of both data and metadata within the VP network, with metadata containing explicit access conditions.