Navigating the Portal

The ELITE Portal is designed to highlight and support navigation to different types of data, related information, and resources produced by the NIA-funded Exceptional Longevity consortia. This page will go over the different portal components so you can use the site to explore data, resources, and best suit your needs.

Home

The homepage is broken into sections that offer different ways of arriving at resources of interest for you to browse. Below is a breakdown of some of these sections:

About the Portal

This section provides an overview of the exceptional longevity phenotype and summary count of the number of resources contained under the Studies, Data (Files), Cohort Builder (Participants), Publications, and Tools sections. Each summary card also provides direct links to explore resources under the corresponding section.

Exploring the Data

This section provides an upset plot visualization of the data types and quantity of files per data type available on the portal. You can hover over any of the bar plots to see a detailed count and click on any bar plot to arrive directly at a filtered selection of the files associated with that data type.

What’s New

This section highlights recent articles published to the ELITE Portal News page.

Related Resources

This section lists external resource sites relevant to the ELITE Portal, including complementary data repositories and resource sites for cross-species researchers. Clicking on the linked header for an item will take you to an external site.

Our Partners

This section summarizes the partner organizations we collaborated with to develop and populate the ELITE Portal. Clicking on Visit Website will take you to an external site. Clicking on the linked header will take you to the internal page on the ELITE Portal with more information about the particular project.

Our People & Institutions

This section highlights individuals who helped contribute to the ELITE Portal and its resources.

Explore

The core of the portal is the Explore tab, which you can access along the top menu.

The Explore section is where you can access the portal data and other resources. This data is organized into categories, represented by the subtabs under the Explore tab in the navigation menu. You can explore data by Data, Cohort Builder, Projects, Studies, Publications, Computational Tools, People.

Information Hierarchy in the Portal

The resources and information found under the Explore subtabs is stored in a hierarchy, as shown below.

These terms can have slightly different definitions depending on context (for example, other portals in the Sage network might define them differently). Full definitions can be found in the Glossary, but in brief this how these terms are defined in the ELITE Portal:

• Program: a program represents a group of scientists working together towards a common research goal. In this way, “Consortia” is often used interchangeably with “program.”

• Projects: a project is typically associated with an NIH grant. The terms project and grant are often used interchangeably.

• Studies: A study is the primary unit of data organization in the portal. Essentially, each study represents an individual research project with specific objectives and focus (one project can operate multiple studies) A study can represent data generated from a specific human cohort, data from experiments on a model system, cross-consortium data processing and analysis efforts, or data associated with a specific publication.

• Data: Individual files associated with a study, available for download.

• Cohort Builder: A tool for exploring attributes and data related to individual human study participants.

• People: These are the researchers and supporting stakeholders who contribute to the portal and make up the consortium.

• Publications: Publications are a core output of research studies—many of them are Open Access and can be directly accessed by anyone. Note that this does not include pre-prints.

• Computational Tools: Tools available to the research community to assist with data research and analysis.

Navigating the Explore Section

Each of these Explore pages is generally displayed in the same way. There is a Filter section on the left (1), a visualization section on top (2), and a collection of data just below (3).

Learn how to use the filtering and visualization tools here: Use Case #1: Find and Download Data Associated With a Selected Study

Analysis Platforms

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.

Data Access

The Data Access tab includes both information about how to obtain access to data held within the portal and a list of past Intended Data Use Statements.

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.

Contribute

The Contribute tab includes information about how to contribute data to the Portal, either as a member of one of the Portal’s supported programs or as a Community Contributor.

News

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.

Help

The Help tab brings you to this help site!

What to read next

Now that you know how to navigate the portal from a high level, you may want to learn how to access data.