The mission of the European Health Data and Evidence Network (EHDEN) is to reduce the time needed to provide answers in real world, health research. It will achieve this by developing the required infrastructure in a federated network at scale across Europe, collaboration on research methodologies, and education in an open science collaboration. The EHDEN portal is the main tool through which the EHDEN framework can be accessed. It is based on a content management system that allows linkage to the different underlying applications.

The EHDEN portal is built based on MONTRA*, a rapid-application development framework designed to facilitate the integration and discovery of heterogeneous objects. MONTRA is a plugin-based architecture that allows dynamic composition of services over represented datasets. 

All of the building blocks of the EHDEN portal are plugins that can be attached or removed to the main architecture. The administrator of the portal controls the on/off switch of the various building blocks. Additionally, a role-based access control mechanism enables the community manager to grant access to these plugins to different users categories.

Illustration of the two core blocks of a MONTRA instantiation: full-fledged metadata catalogue and standalone plugins that can be seamlessly integrated with the architecture.

The EHDEN portal is an online platform that provides access to the individual EHDEN applications using a Single Sign-On (SSO) mechanism. It acts as documentation repository, gateway to the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) certification process, EHDEN tools (ARACHNE, ATLAS and Catalogue) and the EHDEN Academy content. The process of linking to different functionalities is supported by a modular plugin-based architecture, i.e., each portal core component will be treated as a plugin that can be added or removed according to user profile and preferences.

Overview of the EHDEN portal building blocks based on the MONTRA framework.

EHDEN has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 806968. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA. 

*Silva, L. B., Trifan, A., & Oliveira, J. L. (2018). Montra: An agile architecture for data publishing and discovery. Computer methods and programs in biomedicine, 160, 33-42.