The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking applications to support resource projects to enable Environmental Health Sciences (EHS) communities to openly develop, extend, adapt, or refine data and metadata standards as well as associated tools to implement standards.
Donor Name: National Institutes of Health (NIH)
State: All States
County: All Counties
U.S. Territories: American Samoa, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 05/10/2023
Size of the Grant:$400,000
Grant Duration: 5 years
Details:
The initiative is intended to catalyze community-driven standards development and related implementation in environmental health. Projects can support activities at any point in the data standards lifecycle and should build on existing resources, infrastructure, and partnerships whenever possible. The standards, software, best practices, or other tools developed should be broadly disseminated for adoption by the relevant biomedical communities.
Specific Areas of Interest
Examples of activities within the three categories that can be supported under this FOA include, but are not limited to the following:
Collaborator, contributor, and user-community engagement
Activities of interest involve engaging relevant persons, groups, and organizations throughout the data standards lifecycle. Within this context, the ‘community’ for a given standard encompasses a broad and diverse range of individuals or groups involved at various points throughout the lifecycle including, but not limited to science domain experts, researchers, ontologists, librarians, data scientists, data stewards, data engineers, software developers, vendors, repositories, societies, publishers, advocacy groups, and other end-users. Data scientists, engineers, or related experts in domains outside of environmental health are also important community members to consider.
Examples of activities that may be appropriate for this FOA include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Convening expert panels/working groups for standards development
- Building social networks and consensus across domains or organizations
- Facilitating use and adoption of standards through workshops, trainings, and other outreach mechanisms
- Understanding how and why people are using standards
- Incorporating user feedback in evaluation and maintenance of the resource
Open standards for data and metadata
Activities of interest include developing, extending, adapting, or refining data and metadata standards in key gap areas of the environmental health language. The intended scope is to support curation and harmonization for one or more science areas relevant to the NIEHS mission. These standards should promote consistent information sharing, interoperability, and common understanding.
Examples of standards that may be appropriate for this FOA include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Clear, unambiguous terminologies
- Controlled vocabularies and ontologies
- Minimal information standards
- Modular metadata reporting templates
- Schemas that link together semantic meaning and data
- Common formats, structures, and rules for data exchange
- Guidance and codes of practice for measuring, capturing, or sharing data
Tools for standards implementation
Activities of interest include developing, extending, adapting, or refining software tools to implement data and metadata standards for the EHS community. The intended scope is to make it easier for people to curate and share high quality data and to facilitate broad adoption of consensus standards.
Examples of tools that may be appropriate for this FOA include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Web templates and software for automation of metadata capture
- Software tools for terminology mapping or harmonization
- Tools for data transformation into common formats
- Data submission and curation workflows
- Related Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
Funding Information
Application budgets are limited to $400,000 direct cost per year and should reflect the actual needs of the proposed project.
Project Period
The scope of the proposed project should determine the project period. The maximum project period is 5 years.
Eligibility Criteria
Higher Education Institutions
- Public/State Controlled Institutions of Higher Education
- Private Institutions of Higher Education
The following types of Higher Education Institutions are always encouraged to apply for NIH support as Public or Private Institutions of Higher Education:
- Hispanic-serving Institutions
- Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
- Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs)
- Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions
- Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs)
Nonprofits Other Than Institutions of Higher Education
- Nonprofits with 501(c)(3) IRS Status (Other than Institutions of Higher Education)
For-Profit Organizations
- Small Businesses
- For-Profit Organizations (Other than Small Businesses)
Local Governments
- State Governments
- County Governments
- City or Township Governments
- Special District Governments
- Indian/Native American Tribal Governments (Federally Recognized)
- Indian/Native American Tribal Governments (Other than Federally Recognized)
Federal Government
- Eligible Agencies of the Federal Government
- U.S. Territory or Possession
Other
- Independent School Districts
- Public Housing Authorities/Indian Housing Authorities
- Native American Tribal Organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments)
- Faith-based or Community-based Organizations
- Regional Organizations
Foreign Institutions
- Non-domestic (non-U.S.) Entities (Foreign Institutions) are not eligible to apply.
- Non-domestic (non-U.S.) components of U.S. Organizations are not eligible to apply.
- Foreign components, as defined in the NIH Grants Policy Statement, are allowed.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
