background of the Bolder project
Since the beginning of the Amsterdam Cohort Studies on HIV/AIDS among homosexual men (1984) and drug users (1985) a lot of datasets have been collected. Apart from standard virological and immunological tests and standrd questionnaires extra trials with other tests and questionnaires have been collected.
These data were collected or generated in four places / institutions:
- department of Clinical Viro-Immunology, CLB
- department of Human Retrovirology, Amsterdam Institute of Viral Genomics
- National Antiviral Therapy Evaluation Centre (NATEC)
- Municipal Health Service (GGGD)
There has never been a central repository for these data and data got lost. Furthermore the knowledge about the datasets was often gone when a researcher got his or her PhD and applied for another job. Finally, because each researcher was free to choose an ID for the participants, it was difficult to combine information of two or more datasets or get a complete picture of what had been collected about one person in various trials.
Therefore the Bolder project was started in januari 2000. At this moment the following persons are involved:
- CLB - Silvia Broersen
- Virology - Margreet Bakker
- Natec - Gerrit Jan Weverling
- GGGD - Anneke Krol and Gerben Rienk Visser
We set out to make a database that could store information
- about publications, based on data collected among the participants of the Cohorts
- about the collected data: what tables were used, what fields do the tables have, when were the data collected, etc.
- who participated in the studies and by what ID are they known