Advancing Study Metadata Models to Support an Exposomic Informatics Infrastructure

摘要

Exposomic research is an emerging field of study that seeks to address environmental exposures and its effects on life, health, and disease development. Research using exposomic data includes those related to the research and development of sensor devices, chemistry of environmental species and exposure pathways. Concurrently, with the increase in biomedical research interests and advances in exposome data collection, data are increasingly available.1 In order to support such translational exposomic studies, there is a need for an informatics infrastructure along with tools to facilitate access and use by investigators. However, to date, there is no standard or systematic way to model a translational exposomic research study. To support research using personalized and environmental sensor devices, we developed a model for exposomic studies to cover the design, conduct and analytic phases of a study. We reviewed existing study metadata representations and compared them with a sample of publicly available exposome studies from the literature and others elicited from researchers. Gaps were found in how sensor data are represented in the existing study metadata models and in general, a lack of detail into data requirements for exposome studies; all needed for an informatics infrastructure. To address these gaps we consolidated data elements from existing domain specific models. In particular, we incorporated the Sensor Common Metadata Specification (SCMS) into the model. The SCMS is currently being implemented in the Utah PRISMS Informatics Ecosystem (UPIE) and includes metadata of measured data from sensors, the deployment of sensors, and the sensors itself.2 This model is currently being validated within UPIE for reproducible representations of exposomic studies, and computable specification of study data integration, to support the study of effects of the environment on health and advance the science in this area.