After two and a half years of collaboration, the European QUANTUM project concluded in June 2026. Bringing together 35 partners from across Europe, the project worked to develop a common system for assessing and communicating the quality and usefulness of health data.

The project focused on creating a European Data Quality and Utility Label, allowing researchers, policymakers and healthcare professionals to better understand whether datasets are reliable and suitable for their intended purposes.

As a partner in QUANTUM, CESSDA brought expertise from the social sciences into a project primarily focused on health data, contributing to the development and testing of tools that could also benefit research data infrastructures across other disciplines.

CESSDA partners joining forces

CESSDA participated in QUANTUM through the Main Office and three national expert teams: DANS-KNAW in the Netherlands, the UK Data Service (UKDS) in the United Kingdom, and the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) in Greece.

Together, the partners contributed their expertise in research data management, repository infrastructure, metadata standards and interoperability.

An important part of their work focused on evaluating how the QUANTUM Labelling Tool (QLT) could be used by research data repositories and integrated into existing services.

Their contributions helped identify both the opportunities and practical challenges of implementing a common European data quality label.

Testing and improving the QUANTUM Labelling Tool

One of the key contributions from CESSDA partners was the technical evaluation of the QUANTUM Labelling Tool, which allows data holders to assess the quality and utility of their datasets.

EKKE, which operates within the Greek Research Infrastructure SoDaNet, installed a local version of the tool on its own servers and tested it using published records from the SoDaNet Data Catalogue.

These included social science datasets containing health-related information, allowing EKKE to examine how the tool performed with data outside the traditional biomedical and clinical fields.

The testing covered the complete assessment process, from entering dataset descriptions and answering questions about data quality to generating assessment reports in PDF and RDF formats.

The exercise demonstrated the potential of the tool, but also identified areas where further development would make it easier for repositories to adopt.

Working together with DANS-KNAW, UKDS and the CESSDA Main Office, EKKE contributed recommendations for improving the tool, including automated metadata transfers, support for persistent identifiers and dataset versions, and better integration with existing repository systems such as Dataverse.

These findings were incorporated into the project's work on implementing the quality label.

Connecting data quality labels with existing repositories

For DANS-KNAW, which hosts both social science and health-related research data, QUANTUM offered an opportunity to explore connections between the new European quality label and existing approaches to assessing research data.

These included FAIR assessment procedures and tools such as F-UJI, which DANS-KNAW helped develop. FAIR refers to the principles of making research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

One important conclusion from the CESSDA partners' work was that repositories and dataset owners have different roles to play in the assessment process.

The current QUANTUM tool requires information that often only the dataset owner can provide. Consequently, repositories cannot independently complete the entire assessment.

Instead, repositories could play an important role in connecting datasets to their quality labels, helping researchers discover and interpret this information alongside the data itself.

To make this possible, the CESSDA partners highlighted the need for technical solutions such as application programming interfaces (APIs) and plug-ins, allowing the QUANTUM tool to communicate more easily with existing repository systems.

These recommendations provide valuable insights for other CESSDA Service Providers considering how data quality assessments could be incorporated into their own services.

Bringing social science expertise into the European Health Data Space

Beyond the technical contributions, QUANTUM provided an important opportunity for CESSDA to participate in developments surrounding the European Health Data Space (EHDS).

The EHDS is an EU initiative intended to facilitate the secure access, exchange and reuse of electronic health data across Europe. Among its objectives is to improve the availability of data for research, innovation and policymaking.

An important part of this framework concerns the quality and usefulness of data made available for secondary use, meaning purposes beyond the original reason for collecting the information.

The quality labels developed through QUANTUM aim to support this process by providing standardised information about datasets.

For the participating CESSDA partners, involvement in QUANTUM also offered insights into the development of Health Data Access Bodies, which will coordinate access to health data at national level, and emerging metadata standards such as HealthDCAT, designed to help describe and exchange information about health datasets.

Although the EHDS primarily concerns health data, its development is also relevant to social science research infrastructures.

Social science datasets frequently contain information about health, living conditions, employment, education and other factors that influence people's health and well-being.

Furthermore, the approaches being developed for assessing data quality, improving interoperability and managing access could help inform similar initiatives in the social sciences and humanities.

Through QUANTUM, CESSDA and its partners contributed to discussions on how data quality and usefulness should be understood across different disciplines, ensuring that the experiences of social science data infrastructures were represented alongside those of clinical and biomedical data providers.

Looking ahead: Lessons for CESSDA

Participation in QUANTUM strengthened collaboration between CESSDA Service Providers and established connections with organisations working in the European health data ecosystem.

The project also provided valuable practical experience in evaluating new data quality tools, identifying technical requirements and exploring how common European standards could be integrated into existing repository infrastructures.

For CESSDA Service Providers, these experiences highlight the importance of interoperability, automated metadata exchange and cooperation between data owners and repositories when introducing new quality assessment procedures.

More broadly, QUANTUM demonstrated the value of cross-disciplinary collaboration. The expertise developed within social science data infrastructures can contribute to European initiatives in other research fields, while lessons from those initiatives can support the continued development of CESSDA's own services.

Although the project has concluded, its outcomes offer opportunities for further cooperation and contribute to the ongoing discussion about how Europe can make research data more trustworthy, accessible and reusable.

Learn more about the project and explore its results at quantumproject.eu.