Making Common Fund data more findable: Catalyzing a Data Ecosystem

The Common Fund Data Ecosystem has created a flexible system of data federation that enables users to discover datasets from across the Common Fund without requiring the data owners to move, reformat, or rehost those data. The CFDEs federation system is centered on a metadata catalog that ingests metadata from individual Common Fund Program Data Coordination Centers into a uniform metadata model that can then be indexed and searched from a centralized portal. This uniform Crosscut Metadata Model (C2M2), supports the wide variety of data set types and metadata terms used by the individual and is designed to enable easy expansion to accommodate new datatypes. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.