Metadata-driven Ad Hoc Query of Clinical Studies Data

The Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data representation is widely used in both clinical patient record systems (CPRSs) and clinical study data management systems (CSDMS). Both of these systems are heterogeneous in that many types of data are also represented conventionally, a situation that complicates data display, editing and ad hoc query. Seamless functioning of such systems mandates the presence of developer-defined metadata (data describing the rest of the database) that records, among other things, how individual parameters are represented within the system. We illustrate a web-based ad hoc query tool that relies on the metadata to generate syntactically and semantically correct SQL