Flywheel Delivers FAIR Principles
The FAIR acronym is a nice way to summarize four important aspirations of modern research practice: scholarly data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The article describing the FAIR aspirations is excellent, and we recommend reading it. Some limitations of current practice are described here. Our company was founded to advance research and we embrace these principles.
Flywheel, software used by thousands of researchers, embodies tools and technology that deliver on the FAIR principles.
About Flywheel
Flywheel is an integrated suite of software tools that (a) stores data and metadata in a searchable database, (b) includes computational tools to analyze the data, and (c) provides users with both browser-based and command line tools to manage data and perform analyses. Our customers use these tools on a range of hardware platforms: cloud systems, on-premise clusters and servers, and laptops.
Flywheel supports users throughout a project’s life cycle. The software can import data directly from the instrument (like an MR scanner) and extract metadata from the instrument files that is stored into the database. Auxiliary data from other sources can also be imported into the database. The user can view, annotate, and analyze the data, keeping track of all the scientific activities. Finally the data and analyses can be shared widely when it is time to publish the results.
FAIR Data Principals Implemented
Findable
Flywheel makes data ‘Findable’ by search and browsing. The Flywheel search tools address the entire site’s dataset, looking for data with particular features. It is straightforward, for example, to find the diffusion-weighted imaging data for female subjects between the ages of 30 and 45. The user can contact the owners of the data for access, and the data returned by a search can be placed in a virtual project (Collection) for reuse and further analysis.
Search is most effective when there are high quality metadata associated with the data and analyses. Flywheel creates a deep set of metadata by scanning the image data, classifying them. Users can attach specific searchable key words and add data-specific notes at many places - from the overall project level, the session level, the specific data file or the analyses. Users can find data by searching based on these descriptions.
Accessible
Our customers frequently observe that there is a conflict between making data accessible (sharing) while complying with health privacy rules. We live in a world with privacy officers on the one hand and open data advocates on the other.
Flywheel delivers an accessible solution that is respectful of both principles. We implemented a rigorous user-rights management system that is easy to use. Access to the data and analyses is controlled through a simple web-based interface. The system implements the different roles that are needed during a project’s life cycle. At first perhaps only the principal investigator and close collaborators have access; later, additional people (reviewers, other scientists) might be granted access to check the data and analyses. When ready, the anonymized data and full descriptions of the analyses can be made publicly viewable. An effective system that manages a project through these stages is complicated to write, but Flywheel makes the system easy-to-use through its browser interface.
Interoperable
Most scientists have felt the frustration of learning that a dataset is available, but the file format or organization of the data files requires substantial effort to decode and use. The medical imaging community has worked to reduce this burden by defining standardized file and directory organizations. Flywheel is committed to using and promoting these standards.
Our experience teaches us that well intentioned file formats and directory organizations are not enough. Flywheel stores far more information than what one finds in the header of a DICOM or NIfTI file or the BIDS directory structure. Our commitment to interoperability includes reading in files and directories in these standards and even writing Flywheel data into these formats. Beyond this, we are committed to tools that import and export data and metadata between Flywheel and other database systems.
Flywheel is further committed to supporting the interoperability of computational tools. We have opened our infrastructure so that users can analyze data using Flywheel-defined containerized algorithms, their own containers, or their own custom software. The Flywheel standards are clearly defined based on industry-standard formats (e.g., JSON, Docker, Singularity) so that other groups can use them and in this way support computational interoperability.
Reusable
From its inception, Flywheel was designed to make data reusable. Users at a center can share data within their group or across groups, they can reuse the data by combining from different groups, and create and share different computational tools. The user can select data from any project and merge it into a new project. Such reused data is called a Collection in Flywheel. The original data remain securely in place, and the user can analyze the collection as a new virtual project. All the analyses, notes, and metadata of the original data remain attached to the data as they are reused.
Equally important, the computational methods are carefully managed and reusable. Each container for algorithms is accompanied by a precise definition of its control parameters and how they were set at execution time. This combination of container and parameters is called a Flywheel Gear, and the specific Gear that was executed can be reused and shared.
More
The FAIR principles are an important part of the Flywheel system. We have also been able to design in additional functionality that supports these principles.
- Security and data backup are very important and fundamental. The ability to import older data into the modern technology has been valuable to many of our customers.
- The visualization tools built into Flywheel help our customers check for accuracy and data quality as soon as the data are part of the system.
- The programming interface, supported by endpoints accessible in three different scientific programming languages, permits users to test their ideas in a way that gracefully leads to shared data and code.
