Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), under the Medical Library Assistance program (CFDA 93.879), awarded The Leland Stanford Junior University a Project Grant of $231,343 (obligated August 1, 2026, with completion targeted July 31, 2028) to develop a general-purpose, modular infrastructure system for managing the lifecycle of value sets—curated collections of standardized terms used in biomedical metadata creation. The primary deliverable is software infrastructure that enables value-set discovery, collaborative editing, validation, version tracking, and integration with ontology repositories. This system will support researchers, data curators, and informaticians across diverse NIH initiatives in creating and maintaining reusable vocabularies that comply with Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data principles.

The infrastructure addresses a critical gap in the existing biomedical data-sharing ecosystem by providing robust tools to manage terminology standards that ensure metadata consistency, quality, and semantic validity. The system will streamline metadata authoring, enhance dataset comparability through improved semantic search, and reduce manual data harmonization efforts for researchers conducting cross-study analyses. By operationalizing standards-based vocabulary management across the biomedical research landscape, this project directly supports the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science and advances the interconnected, standards-driven data infrastructure necessary for effective biomedical data sharing and reuse.