User requirements elicitation study for ALPHA network data provenance documentation browsing software

Whilst community-based cohorts and demographic surveillance systems provide a rich source of data, use of the data is often limited because successful analysis requires detailed knowledge of the study's contemporary and historical procedures and of data management practices.

To date the ALPHA Network has successfully extracted and harmonised 10 standard data tables from the partner studies. However, these data are still complex and require considerable prior knowledge to use effectively, which in practice means the data can only be used in collaboration with one of the ALPHA staff. This data collection contains qualitative data collected as part of scoping work to establish domain experts’ perspectives on the functionality that a user-friendly metadata browser for ALPHA datasets should provide.