Data Quality for Medical Data Lakelands

Medicalresearch requires biological material and data. Medical studies based on datawith unknown or questionable quality are useless or even dangerous, asevidenced by recent examples of withdrawn studies. Medical data sets consist ofhighly sensitive personal data, which has to be protected carefully and is onlyavailable for research after approval of ethics committees. These data sets, therefore, cannot be stored in central data warehouses or even in a common datalake but remain in a multitude of data lakes, which we call Data Lakelands. Anexample for such a Medical Data Lakelands are the collections of samples and their annotations in the European federation of biobanks (BBMRI-ERIC). Wediscuss the quality dimensions for data sets for medical research and therequirements 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 researchersto effectively and efficiently identify suitable data sets for medical studies.