About this documentation

Structure

This documentation is conveniently organized so you can easily find what you are looking for:

The "CDS Specification section" is for those of you who are interested in the fine details of the CDS. It contains the specification of the CDS, i.e., what is considered a datatype, how to create a CDS-compliant directory structure, what metadata files are required, what format should each metadata file follow, etc.
The "Implementing the CDS section" contains a step-by-step guide to implement the CDS. We recognize that the specifications are quite extensive and can be difficult and time consuming to implement so we have developed support tools and resources designed to enable anyone to implement CDS without any specific knowledge or expertise. Those tools and resources are also introduced in this section.
The "Design Rationale" section is for those of you who are interest on the rationale behind the design of the CDS. It contains detailed explanation on the different choices made in the CDS (Why one directory per datatype? Why the study_description.json file makes use of the ClinicalTrials.gov schema? etc.).
The Resources section contains various information that didn't fit into the previous sections.

This documentation is maintained from its GitHub repository accessible here.

Have a suggestion for improving the CDS? Need help implementing the CDS? Checkout instructions in our Contributing page.

The structure and some content of this documentation is inspired by the documentation of the BIDS specification.