The Metadata Exchange (MDX)

The first step is to register on a Metadata Exchange instance.

Click the Sign-Up button on the homepage:

Enter your details, ensuring that the email is valid and that your password has at least one letter, one number and a special character and is more than 8 characters long:

NOTE: sometimes the registration takes a while to complete - if you click twice and get the following message you have been registered, it's just completing the process

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, contact your administrator asking them to enable your account.

By default, there are 4 levels of access, administrator, curator, user. The basic differences between these rights are as follows:

A user will be able to view models that they have been assigned
A curator will be able to create new models and modify models that they have been given read-only rights to
A supervisor 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 (set of definitions that describe a data collection, a database/datastore a schema or a specification) documented within the catalogue, with their version number, status i.e. draft, finalised or deprecated, when they were last updated and any assets that have been published i.e. release notes, schemas etc.

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.
Create a new data model
Import menu - import data models in a variety of formats
Admin menu - available if you are a supervisor
User menu - favourites, API key for REST calls etc,
Search – defaulted to search catalogue model, but can be used to search all catalogue elements using the filter options
Data Models list - click on the data model to navigate to the data model itself
Asset - view the published assets associated with a data model i.e. appendices, release notes, exports
Download asset - download the asset directly from the dashboard

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) advance view:

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:

Assets