Developing A Metadata and Documentation Ecosystem To Enable Research Through Uk Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (uk Llc)
UK LLC is the national Trusted Research Environment (TRE) for the UK’s longitudinal research community. To enable cross-sectoral research at scale, UK LLC integrates data from many Longitudinal Population Studies (LPS) and systematically links participants’ health, environmental and socio-economic records into a centralised TRE. The UK LLC TRE currently contains information about >500,000 participants from 22 different LPS. The breadth and volume of data and the many different data owners requires innovative and flexible data curation approaches to ensure UK LLC supports FAIR data principles.
To address challenges in discoverability of data and interoperability, UK LLC has developed a metadata-centric infrastructure. At its core is UK LLC’s Metadata Management System (MMS), which enables UK LLC staff and external data managers to upload and manage metadata efficiently. The MMS supports mapping to widely used metadata standards e.g. DDI, and offers API connectivity to facilitate metadata exchange between both internal and external systems. Metadata is collected and standardised through configurable mappings to ensure consistency and to support analysis across diverse datasets.
Complementary tools include UK LLC Explore (https://explore.ukllc.ac.uk/), a discovery platform providing advanced search and filtering capabilities, with ongoing work to incorporate large language model (LLM) enhancements to improve metadata discovery; UK LLC Guidebook (https://guidebook.ukllc.ac.uk/), which offers detailed provenance, user guidance and insight into how datasets have been linked and processed; and UK LLC Apply (https://apply.ukllc.ac.uk/), UK LLC’s bespoke online application management system. Together, these systems embed metadata interoperability at the core of UK LLC’s infrastructure, enabling efficient discoverability that aids streamlined access to complex linked datasets for longitudinal research.