Tag Archive for: Biomedical Research

NIH CDEs Now Fully Supported in CEDAR for Metadata Authoring

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CEDAR now provides comprehensive support for NIH Common Data Elements (CDEs), making it easier than ever for researchers to incorporate standardized, reusable data definitions into their metadata. With this update, over 28,000 CDEs from the NIH CDE Repository have been ingested, semantically enriched, and published within the CEDAR environment for immediate reuse.

This NIH content complements the existing library of more than 80,000 CDEs from the National Cancer Institute’s caDSR, already accessible in CEDAR through earlier work. Together, these CDEs span a wide range of domains and enable more consistent, interoperable, and FAIR metadata collection across biomedical research projects.

CDEs as First-Class Metadata

CEDAR supports CDEs as structured metadata components, respecting the semantics and specifications defined by ISO/IEC 11179 and NIH practice. In CEDAR’s web-based Template Designer, each CDE includes:

  • Unique identifiers and versioning
  • Structured data types and value domains
  • Enumerated value sets (with ontology mappings via BioPortal)
  • Standardized and alternative question texts
  • Embedded provenance and deployment metadata

Researchers can assemble these CDEs into custom metadata templates without writing code, ensuring semantic consistency and compliance with community standards.

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HEAL Initiative Adopts CEDAR for FAIR Metadata Submission

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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.

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