Trusted World of Corona
The COVID-19 Pandemic stimulated - under confusion, duress, and urgency - a rapid proliferation of research publications and datasets that were overwhelming to researchers. Furthermore, significant levels research findings were shown to be nonreproducible and even false. With 370 thousand articles (in 8000 journals) published in the first 3 years of the Pandemic, FAIR data capabilities like those demonstrated in Trusted World of Corona (TWOC) are essential for society to manage and assess research results in times of crisis and especially in the context of public policy and economic decisions.
The TWOC project demonstrated that virtual environments of interconnected FAIR data (TWOC Rooms) allowed interdisciplinary teams to find and access complex information (including patient records) under appropriate ethical and legal conditions, to help answer research questions, while FAIR metadata allowed published findings to be assessed for their trustworthiness.
The TWOC project built a decentralized network of six FAIR Data Points hosting both peer-reviewed information as well as real-world observations (patient records) and a Dashboard user interface that allowed collaborative teams of researchers to view the data as interactive knowledge graphs. The Dashboard also allowed users to formulate hypotheses (represented also as knowledge graphs) and to then test them by sending queries (“data visiting”) to the FAIR Data Points. The retrieved information could be statically analysed for its confirmation/refutation of the hypothesis. Experts could use the Dashboard to also annotate individual associations in the knowledge graphs with their informed opinion on the trustworthiness of those associations. Such annotations subsequently become part of the rich provenance metadata that can be used by other researchers when searching for and assessing the trustworthiness of relevant information.
The project supported four separate TWOC Rooms where collaborative teams of experts worked together to solve a COVID-19 research question:
- Creating a COVID-19 Disease Model;
- Dexamethasone as a treatment for severe COVID-19 cases;
- Understanding the outcomes of a Tocilizumab clinical trial;
- COVID-19 in children treated with immunosuppressive medication for kidney disease.
