• DE close
• BE close
• DK close

MDM-Portal (Medical Data-Models) is a meta-data registry for creating, analysing, sharing and reusing medical forms, developed by the Institute of Medical Informatics, Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany. see also https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0044-1786839 Electronic forms for documentation of patient data are an integral part within the workflow of physicians. A huge amount of data is collected either through routine documentation forms (EHRs) for electronic health records or as case report forms (CRFs) for clinical trials. This raises major scientific challenges for health care, since different health information systems are not necessarily compatible with each other and thus information exchange of structured data is hampered. Software vendors provide a variety of individual documentation forms according to their standard contracts, which function as isolated applications. Furthermore, free availability of those forms is rarely the case. Currently less than 5 % of medical forms are freely accessible. Based on this lack of transparency harmonization of data models in health care is extremely cumbersome, thus work and know-how of completed clinical trials and routine documentation in hospitals are hard to be re-used. The MDM-Portal serves as an infrastructure for academic (non-commercial) medical research to contribute a solution to this problem. It already contains more than 25,000 system-independent forms (CDISC ODM Format, www.cdisc.org, Operational Data Model) with more than 600,000 data-elements. This enables researchers to view, discuss, download and export forms in most common technical formats such as PDF, CSV, Excel, SQL, SPSS, R, etc. A growing user community will lead to a growing database of medical forms. In this matter, we would like to encourage all medical researchers to register and add forms and discuss existing forms.

The ETOX database allows access to effects information from aquatic and terrestrial ecotoxicology. Furthermore, ETOX contains information on various national and international environmental quality guidelines, targets, standards, criteria, and limit values. In focus are substances which are relevant for assessment of surface water pollution to trigger the development of environmental quality standards according to Water Framework Directive 60/2000/EC.

The Online Resource for Community Annotation of Eukaryotes (ORCAE) is an online genome annotation resource offering users the necessary tools and information to validate and correct gene annotations. It is a gene-centric wiki-style annotation portal offering public access to a wide variety of plant, fungal and animal genomes. The basic setup of ORCAE is highly comparable to wiki systems such as MediaWiki, and the information page for each gene can be seen as a ‘topic’ page of a traditional text wiki.

Resarch Data Repository of Hamburg University of Technology