FAIR in practice with DDI Lifecycle – The Mekong project

Following the international movement towards open science, the Constances cohort – known to provide the research community with high quality health and medical data - started in 2025 an ambitious project to build a metadata system leveraging the FAIR principles and supporting the creation, update and dissemination of FAIR data and metadata. DDI-Lifecycle has been chosen as the core modeling framework to realize this vision.The presentation will highlight the strategic principles guiding the project: activate the metadata whenever and wherever possible, keep the users’ needs at the center of the solution and promoting openness (both in terms of open science and open source).We will also explore key challenges in building this system: Representing longitudinal studies with DDI-Lifecycle; and the limits of variables to concepts mapping; Translating an existing business model into DDI-Lifecycle, and the implications of implementation choices; Encouraging adhesion to DDI and transfer knowledge to Constances’ data managers and stakeholders. Finally, we will provide an overview of the project’s midterm roadmap and milestones, including the future use of complementary standards such as VTL or DCAT to enhance the documentation across all phases of the Constances’ data lifecycle.