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Reviewing 2025: AI, federation and common data standards

At the start of 2025 the product team put out a joint blog looking at the year ahead, and itemising what they saw as the likely strategic trends for 2025, these were: 

  • Securely integrating AI capabilities in the DRE
  • Expanding our data federation capabilities and growing The Aridhia Network
  • Increased support for common data standards like OMOP and SDTM
  • Enabling smooth metadata syndication to drive collaboration across platforms 

This blog reviews our work in 2025 against these priorities, and assess our progress against each of them. 

Software development roadmaps and backlogs are notoriously fickle and subject to change, but our overall priorities for 2025 remained largely consistent with the trends we identified at the start of the year. 

Securely integrating AI capabilities in the DRE 

What we said: 

Providing access to specialised, offline DRE-hosted LLMs in a secure and audited manner allows researchers, data scientists and curation experts to experiment with these technologies, or accelerate development time using data-aware code generation, while secure in the knowledge that their data is safe with no possibility of exfiltration or further training on secure data. 

What we did: 

We have spent the year developing our AI Research Assistant, AIRA. AIRA runs a Triton Inference server which runs stored models against workspace data. The models are run on existing workspace infrastructure meaning that there is no risk of exfiltration or data leakage.  

We are still working on optimising how AI models run in the DRE as well as how they will be managed by administrators. More to come soon!  

Expanding our data federation capabilities and growing The Aridhia Network 

What we said: 

…..the reality of operating under data protection legislation such as GDPR…..makes direct data sharing more difficult. Data federation represents a potential technical solution to this difficulty, allowing users to run analysis on data they do not have direct access to. 

What we did: 

Our work on federation continued to build through 2025, the development of the Federated Node and our work with PHEMS. Later in 2025 we joined the DARE UK TREvolution project, we published our interim report in November, showing that a DRE workspace can be used as federated infrastructure.  

Increased support for common data standards like OMOP and SDTM 

What we said: 

……the emergence of common data standards is not new, but their adoption seems to be reaching a critical mass with, for example, the NHS SDE adoption of the OMOP standard as its common data model. This is at least partially driven by the emergence of data federation, which to work effectively requires the reuse of common analytics, and this can only be achieved where data owners have adopted a common data standard such as OMOP. 

What we did: 

We introduced the data model framework to FAIR Data Services, allowing the DRE to better support particular data models. In the first release, users can now choose to identify a dataset as using the OMOP or SDTM data models, and where OMOP is selected the data owner can validate their dataset against the OMOP standard.   

Enabling smooth metadata syndication to drive collaboration across platforms 

What we said: 

In the Aridhia DRE the FAIR API makes it easy for approved users to retrieve dataset metadata and push this to other platforms, and our dedicated HDR UK syndication endpoint allows data owners to easily populate their dataset metadata to the Innovation Gateway. One of our ambitions for 2025 is to extend our syndication capabilities, both between DRE hubs for the Aridhia Network, and with external partners.

What we did: 

Our assumption was that the ongoing emergence of national and international data hubs would lead to a greater immediate demand for extensions to our existing metadata syndication capabilities. This did not occur, in the 2025 blog we also mentioned the SSO feature developed for EPND and ADDI, and further DRE users have requested the same functionality. We were correct in our belief that greater interoperability would continue to be a priority, just not the form that it would take.

At the end of the month we’ll publish our look forward to 2026, and how we see the market developing and what this means for our priorities as a product team.

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January 6, 2026

 

Laura & Ross

Co-written by Laura Shishodia and Ross Stiven, Product Managers of Workspaces and FAIR, respectively.