D3.6 Feasibility Assessment of the Implementation of X-Road for Research Data
The document describes the work performed when analysing the feasibility of using X-Road-based solutions, adopted in Estonia and Finland, for exchanging research data. X-Road® is open-source software and ecosystem solution that provides unified and secure data exchange between organisations. X-Road is developed by the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), a nonprofit association established in 2017 by the governments of Estonia and Finland. Furthermore, the national X-Road environments in Estonia and Finland are federated, which allows for an easy technological way of establishing trustworthy communication between organizations participating in X-Road environments in Estonia and Finland.
To analyse the feasibility, we have partnered with a research group at the University of Tartu, developing precision medicine solutions for clinical practice. The solution developed by them uses X-Road to receive requests from the clinical labs, access genomic data by the analytical engine, and publish results to the Estonian Medical info system. For the proof of concept, we have taken the part of the solution responsible for providing genomic data and analysing it – and deployed that in 3 organizations across 3 countries: UT (Estonia), CSC (Finland) and RTU (Latvia), the latter joined Estonian X-Road development environment as part of the feasibility analysis. The resulting solution enables the scenario, where an analytical engine in one country is able to request on-demand in a safe and efficient way the genomic data of a person from the registry in another country. We worked with the development environments of X-Road and generated genomic data to avoid the extra burden of legal approvals, in other aspects the solution is equal to the production one.
In this document, we present the experience in setting up the proof of concept from organizational as well as technical sides and summarise initial findings. Overall we believe that adopting X-Road for real-time applications working with sensitive data has a good potential in R&D.
Read the deliverable on Zenodo
This deliverable is EC submitted, not approved.