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Navigating the Portal

At a very high level, let’s go over the basic structure of the portal so you can navigate it successfully. Landing on the portal, you’ll find a menu along the top with different tabs to choose from:

Explore, Analysis Platforms, Data Access, Contribute, News, and Help.

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Let’s go through each one so you understand how to navigate the portal in a way that best suits your needs.

The Explore tab isn’t a page on its own, but a menu of subtabs/pages to choose from:

These items correspond to the different ways in which you can filter and view data.

For example, the Projects page lists all projects, so you can find and select one of interest to visit that project’s specific page, which will list all of its associated studies. All of these pages operate in the same way—access any one to view data based on that category.

See this page for a more detailed breakdown of these portal components.

Each of these pages have helpful filtering tools in order to narrow down your search and find precisely the content you’re looking for. Find detailed instructions for using the filtering tools here.

Analysis Platforms links to a landing page about CAVATICA, a data analysis and sharing platform designed to accelerate discovery in a scalable, cloud-based compute environment where data, results, and workflows are shared among the world’s research community. CAVATICA is developed by Velsera and funded in-part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund.

CAVATICA provides you:

  • Access to hundreds of commonly used, pre-installed bioinformatics tools through its Public Apps Gallery. You can also bring your own workflows into the cloud.

  • Integration with data from the ELITE Portal and other datasets, including 1000 Genomes, Framingham Heart Study, and TOPMed. You can also bring your own files into CAVATICA.

  • Project spaces to collaborate with other researchers around the world without having to download datasets.

This feature is FedRAMP and FISMA compliant, and meets NIH standards for data security, storage, and distribution. It is HIPAA-compliant and can be used for PHI data.

The Data Access tab isn’t a page on its own, but a menu of related subtabs/pages.

Although anyone can view data readily from the portal (thanks to our open data sharing model), you need a Synapse account in order to download data.

Data held in the portal falls into two categories: Open and Controlled Use. While Open data is available for all registered Synapse users without limitations, Controlled Use data is available to registered, certified, or validated Synapse users that fulfill specific requirements for data access, including a signed Data Use Certificate and Intended Data Use Statement.

Find instructions to register for a Synapse account and to submit a DUC here.

The data you access on the ELITE Portal has been contributed by recipients of grants funded by the Portal supported programs.

The News tab links to a site dedicated to ELITE Portal-related news and information. You can view regular data release updates and subscribe to our newsletter.

This tab brings you to this help site!

Now that you know how to navigate the portal from a high level, visit this page to learn about how information/data is organized within the portal. Once you’re familiar with the portal’s information architecture, you may want to learn how to access data.

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