BIH / Charité Virtual Research Environment

The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an open-source data management platform that enables medical researchers to store, process and share data in compliance with the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The VRE addresses the present lack of digital research data infrastructures fulfilling the need for (a) data protection for sensitive data, (b) capability to process complex data such as radiologic imaging, (c) flexibility for creating own processing workflows, (d) access to high performance computing. The platform promotes FAIR data principles and reduces barriers to biomedical research and innovation. The VRE offers a web portal with graphical and command-line interfaces, segregated data zones and organizational measures for lawful data onboarding, isolated computing environments where large teams can collaboratively process sensitive data privately, analytics workbench tools for processing, analyzing, and visualizing large datasets, automated ingestion of hospital data sources, project-specific data warehouses for structured storage and retrieval, graph databases to capture and query ontology-based metadata, provenance tracking, version control, and support for automated data extraction and indexing. The VRE is based on a modular and extendable state-of-the art cloud computing framework, a RESTful API, open developer meetings, hackathons, and comprehensive documentation for users, developers, and administrators. The VRE with its concerted technical and organizational measures can be adopted by other research communities and thus facilitates the development of a co-evolving interoperable platform ecosystem with an active research community.

虚拟研究环境（VRE）是一款开源的数据管理平台，旨在助力医学研究人员遵循欧盟（EU）通用数据保护条例（GDPR）的要求，存储、处理及共享数据。VRE旨在解决当前缺乏满足以下需求的数字研究数据基础设施的现状：（a）对敏感数据的保护，（b）处理如放射学成像等复杂数据的能力，（c）创建自定义处理工作流程的灵活性，（d）访问高性能计算资源。该平台推崇FAIR数据原则，并降低生物医学研究和创新的门槛。VRE提供包含图形和命令行界面的网络门户，划分数据区域和组织措施以确保合法的数据导入，隔离的计算环境，以便大型团队可以私密协作处理敏感数据，以及用于处理、分析和可视化大型数据集的分析工作台工具。此外，VRE支持自动化医院数据源的数据摄取，为结构化存储和检索提供项目特定的数据仓库，利用图数据库捕捉和查询基于本体的元数据，实现数据来源追踪、版本控制和自动化数据提取及索引。VRE基于模块化和可扩展的先进云计算框架，提供RESTful API，开放的开发者会议、黑客马拉松，以及面向用户、开发者和管理员的全面文档。凭借其协同的技术和组织措施，VRE可被其他研究群体采纳，从而促进具有活跃研究社区的合作互操作平台生态系统的共同发展。