Data Quality for Medical Data Lakelands

Medical research requires biological material and data. Medical studies based on data with unknown or questionable quality are useless or even dangerous, as evidenced by recent examples of withdrawn studies. Medical data sets consist of highly sensitive personal data, which has to be protected carefully and is only available for research after approval of ethics committees. These data sets, therefore, cannot be stored in central data warehouses or even in a common data lake but remain in a multitude of data lakes, which we call Data Lakelands. An example for such a Medical Data Lakelands are the collections of samples and their annotations in the European federation of biobanks (BBMRI-ERIC). We discuss the quality dimensions for data sets for medical research and the requirements for providers of data sets in terms of both quality of meta-data and meta-data of data quality documentation with the aim to support researchers to effectively and efficiently identify suitable data sets for medical studies.