HEAL Initiative Adopts CEDAR for FAIR Metadata Submission
The NIH HEAL Initiative®—Helping to End Addiction Long-term—has integrated CEDAR into its data infrastructure to support the creation of machine-readable, standards-aligned metadata across its research projects. This integration supports the HEAL commitment to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data practices.
CEDAR in the HEAL Metadata Submission Workflow
As part of the HEAL Platform’s SLMD (Study-Level Metadata) submission process, investigators are now required to submit structured metadata describing their studies, cohorts, and associated variables. To streamline this process and reduce technical overhead, the HEAL Platform provides a preconfigured CEDAR webform for metadata entry.
Using CEDAR, researchers can:
- Enter metadata through a user-friendly web interface—no coding required
- Ensure compliance with HEAL metadata standards
- Automatically generate JSON-LD metadata suitable for submission to the HEAL Data Platform
- Validate entries against controlled vocabularies and expected data formats
All SLMD metadata submitted through CEDAR becomes part of HEAL’s central metadata repository, improving discoverability and reuse of research outputs across HEAL projects.
Learn More and Get Started
- 📝 HEAL Metadata Guidelines: healdatafair.org/resources/metadata
- 📤 Submission Instructions: heal.github.io/platform-documentation/slmd_submission
- 🧩 CEDAR Form Documentation: heal.github.io/cedar-form-docs
Through this integration, HEAL researchers benefit from CEDAR’s flexibility and semantic rigor, while contributing to a growing corpus of interoperable, machine-actionable biomedical metadata.