The first step is to register with a Mx (Metadata Exchange) instance.
Click the Sign Up button on the homepage:
Enter your details, ensuring that the email is valid and that your password is has at least one letter, one number and a special character and is more than 8 characters long:
Shortly after registering your administrator will send you an email to verify your registration.
Once you have verified your details the administrator will enable your account.
If you get the following message logging in, after you have registered:
Please contract your administrator asking them to enable your account.
By default there are 4 levels of access, administrator, curator, user and guest. The basic differences between these rights are as follows:
- A guest will only be able to view finalised and deprecated models
- A user will be able to view draft and finalised models,
- A curator will be able to create and modify models
- An administrator will be able to add new users and administer access rights.
In addition roles can be applied to different data models i.e. you can be a user with read-only rights for one data model but a curator with editing rights on another.
Different Mx instances may be set up with a variety of different access levels and rights, so it is best to consult your administrator to find out what rights and capabilities you have.
Once you login you should see a screen like the one following:
This lists the data models documented within the catalogue. A Data Model ( Data Models ) is set of definitions that describe a data collection, a database/datastore a schema or a specification.
On first sight the control panel may seem a bit daunting, so we've divided the screen into sections, as shown below:
- Home button – clicking this will return the user to this view from anywhere inside the application.
- Quick Actions – A variety of actions, listed below, this include the data item search – not to be confused with the model search in 3.
- General Models Search – This is a search for data models, it does not include other data items, for everything other than data models you need the Data Element search in 2 – explained in detail below.
- Tabs between “My Models” (otherwise known as favourites) and the whole catalogue of datasets. If you use the Mx a lot then you may wish to keep your “favourite” data models here. Click on the “Favourites” button and the model will appear in “My Models” (see below)
- Create (a new model) and Import (a model) Buttons.
To find a particular data model i.e. the cancer model, you can use the general models search, by typing in the search bar (1) and clicking on the data model link(2)
This will take you to the data model (Data Models) main page:
where:
- on the right hand side you've got a display panel
- and on the left hand side you've got a navigation panel
On the display panel (right) you have information about the data model:
This can be split into:
- 1) title panel with the model name i.e. Cancer Model, the model id i.e. 33509 and the model version number i.e. 3.2.0.
- 2) the editor pane where you can favourite, edit, create new versions and get api links for the model
- 3) model policies, see Data Model Policy
- 4) model metadata, information about a data model such as the owner or release date
- 5) any changes or activity is listed here, so you can see if any edits have been made recently. See Activity for more information.
On the navigation panel (left) you can explore different components of the data model:
For more detailed information about these components, please see:
Versioning:
1) The versioning navigation menu shows all the previous versions of a data model.
2) However over a version to display the version number and click the icon highlighted to navigate to a particular version
Imports:
Provides a list of the data models that are referenced by this data model
For example, these could be data models that are related to this - such as external systems that collect this information
OR data models that have elements used by this data model such as the xs:integer type used by some of the data elements in the cancer model that is contained in the XMLSchema data model.
The buttons in the right hand side (Quick Actions) grouping are:
Data Element Search Button 
Click on this and a new (search) screen will pop up, in which you can search for any data element, either in the current model or in any other model. This is the search for data items rather than complete models, in fact this search indexes all other metadata items in the Mx : Data Elements, Data Classes, Data Types, Assets, etc…and you can configure it to point at the current Data Model or include all Data Models in the Metadata Exchange.
Fast Actions Button
Fast Actions - Click on this to get a selection of actions - this menu may vary depending on your configuration. Each button will trigger an action that we detail in later sections.
Curator Button
This is a menu for curating data, which depending on the way the model catalogue has been set up will have a number of actions, all connected with data curating.
Administration settings Button
This will not appear unless you have administrative privileges, if you do it will enable you to perform a number of administrative task, again we will go into more detail elsewhere. Clicking the button will bring up a menu similar to the one illustrated below.
The User Button
This will allow the user to log out, to generate an API key for programmatic access to the catalogue or jump directly to the favourites.
In addition to these menu buttons a number of other ‘context-sensitive’ menu items will appear in the left hand side menu sections as the user explores the Mx, more on this later on.
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