Exploring New Possibilities for Research Data Exploration Using the Example of the German Core Data Set.

The German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) aims to increase the interoperability and reuse of clinical routine data for research purposes. One important result of the MII work is a German-wide common core data set (CDS), which is to be provided by over 31 data integration centers (DIZ) following a strict specification. One standard format for data sharing is HL7/FHIR. Locally, classical data warehouses are often in use for data storage and retrieval. We are interested to investigate the advantages of a graph database in this setting. After having transferred the MII CDS into a graph, storing it in a graph database and subsequently enriching it with accompanying meta-information, we see a great potential for more sophisticated data exploration and analysis. Here we describe the extract-transform-load process which we set up as a proof of concept to achieve the transformation and to make the common set of core data accessible as a graph.