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Introduction to the CSSI DCC Portal

Data repositories are important tools in cancer research, providing safe and sustainable locations to store data, providing access to input data for meta-analyses, and allowing researchers to collaborate and share information across a common resource. The Center for Strategic Scientific Initiatives (CSSI) sponsors a diverse array of projects that generate datasets that vary in content and format, yet are related across certain defining characteristics or metadata. Integrated management of the datasets across all sponsored projects  make the data more accessible, easily accessed, and potentially reused by the cancer research community. 

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• Provides a common location and web access to data from disparate data types including gene expression results from Next Generation Sequencing, microarray experiments, histopathological images, metabolomics data and proteomics data, allowing for easy access by multiple collaborators and researchers located at different geographic locations. Is flexible enough to handle new and unspecified data types.
• Stores the data in one common location so that you can make biological insights that would otherwise be missed by having data in multiple locations.
• Applies the information gained from one study to multiple studies and projects.
• Allows you to search the metadata from each study to identify datasets of interest.
• Develops data storage and data mining modules that can be applied across studies, avoiding duplication of effort and saving costs.
• Develops and/or adopts common vocabularies, data standards, and ontologies for data representation, storage, and comparison.  

What is ISA-TAB?

Investigation-Study-Assay tab-delimited format (ISA-TAB) is a format based on the ISA-TAB specification that is used to capture and communicate the complex metadata required to interpret investigations (experiments) employing combinations of technologies. Metadata in ISA-TAB format facilitates standards-compliant collection, curation, management, and reuse of datasets in a wide variety of life science domains. ISA-TAB builds on the existing paradigm that is Microarray Gene Expression - Tabular format (MAGE-TAB)-a tab-delimited format to exchange microarray data.

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Source: ISA-Tools.org

Contents of this User's Guide

   Hidden DataBefore you upload an archive file to this repository, you must configure it using open-source software made for this purpose, rather than manually creating it in Excel, for example. Refer to Configuring an ISA-TAB Template User's Guide (DRAFT) for procedures. You must register for an account and log in to upload data.