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Our Projects
TDI undertakes strategic projects and provides targeted support to advance FAIR data methods and practices in the traumatic stress field.
We prioritize projects that:
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Develop or extend tools and methods for FAIR data with broad applicability for traumatic stress field
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Develop or maintain traumatic stress data resources intended for re-use beyond the original investigators
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Enable meaningful sharing of data resources relevant to traumatic stress
Several ongoing TDI projects are developing extensible, re-usable tools for archiving, harmonization, and annotation of traumatic stress research data and metadata. Building sustainable methods to maintain and expand FAIR data resources is a strategic priority.
FAIR Data Summit
In September 2023, TDI and the Global Collaboration on Traumatic Stress brought together 20 leaders of FAIR Data projects in the traumatic stress field for a two-day virtual expert summit.
Summit participants shared lessons learned as well as challenges and potential solutions. The Summit identified several high-priority next steps toward making our data more FAIR.
One key outcome of the summit is a 2025 special article collection in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology.
See publications from this issue in Resources / Readings.
More from the summit:
Watch these brief video segments to hear from researchers leading integrative data projects:
Or watch the entire video here.
Archiving and Harmonization Projects
TDI has provided support for data archiving and harmonization via the Child Trauma Data Archives (CTDA) project.
CTDA is working to preserve standardized, harmonized datasets in a trusted long-term repository, ensuring the continued findability and accessibility of this unique set of FAIR child trauma data resources. Lessons learned in CTDA’s data harmonization and preservation work strengthen TDI’s ongoing development of tools and resources to be shared with other data integration projects.
The CTDA team works with TDI to develop tools with broader application to the traumatic stress field, and the CTDA project serves as a testing ground for these methods.
Building Tools That Enable FAIR Data Practices:
Tools for Data Ingest and Harmonization
TDI is designing a set of tools to facilitate a more automated, efficient, and user-friendly ingest and harmonization process for traumatic stress research datasets, easing the process of creating re-usable data resources.
Our 2023 FAIR Data Summit identified a key barrier to bringing disparate existing datasets together for integrated analyses: the time- and labor-intensive process of creating standardized datasets with common variable names and formats and conducting quality assurance to ensure that data are ready for integration and re-use.
This set of tools will help to make it feasible & scalable to reliably and accurately apply data and metadata standards at the individual participant data (IPD) level, and to capture crucial study-level metadata that enables dataset discoverability and use.
The Traumatic STress Ontology (TSTO)
TDI is leading the development of the Traumatic Stress Ontology (TSTO) as a formally specified, machine-actionable, and FAIR ontology resource, along with practical tools to facilitate its use.
The TSTO will give researchers a standardized vocabulary for annotating data and published results, making it easier to find, harmonize, and synthesize data and published results. The traumatic stress research community will be integrally involved in development and maintenance of the TSTO.
The scope of the TSTO encompasses:
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potentially traumatic experiences (i.e. exposures);
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post-trauma responses, some of which may be defined as symptoms of a traumatic stress or other mental health disorder,
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interventions that aim to mitigate problematic responses and their impact,
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etiological processes (biological, psychological, and social/interpersonal) influencing the development of post-trauma responses, and
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individual and social-environmental contextual factors that may play a role in how post-trauma responses are expressed and perceived.
Our process follows best practices in ontology development, and we are partnering with the developers of several key ontologies in mental health and behavior change.
Tools to Annotate Datasets and Publications
TDI is working with the developers of the Paper Authoring Tool (PAT) to adapt and extend the tool’s capabilities for traumatic stress research. The expanded tools will support data integration and evidence synthesis across the research lifecycle, from datasets to publications.
The PAT offers a user-friendly ‘wizard’ that captures key elements regarding a research study. Investigators then export a formatted Word document that serves as a first draft of a research paper, as well as a shareable file containing machine-readable metadata.
TDI and the PAT team are collaborating to adapt the wizard and tools to streamline metadata annotation of both datasets and publications in the traumatic stress field.