A central node in a data ecosystem that aggregates, harmonises, and brokers access to data from multiple upstream sources, exposing the harmonised data to downstream consumers via curated APIs, query interfaces, or download endpoints.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
EMODnet as a marine data hub aggregating from member institutes across Europe.
Is an instance
Health Data Research UK's Innovation Gateway as a hub indexing UK health datasets and brokering access requests.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A point-to-point data integration between two systems is not a data hub.
Not an instance
A single original-source repository is not a hub — it is a source.

Editorial commentary

Data hub is a hub-and-spoke architectural pattern. Distinct from a federated infrastructure (where data stay distributed), a data hub typically centralises a working copy of upstream data with harmonisation and quality-control. Distinct from a data lake (which is schema-on-read), a hub is usually opinionated about the harmonised model presented to consumers. In research contexts, examples include the UK Health Data Research Innovation Gateway, the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet), and many discipline-specific aggregators.

References

Smith G., 'Designing Data Hubs', Communications of the ACM 64(11), 2021.

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Data hub"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-hub" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-hub",
  "name": "Data hub",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-hub",
  "description": "A central node in a data ecosystem that aggregates, harmonises, and brokers access to data from multiple upstream sources, exposing the harmonised data to downstream consumers via curated APIs, query interfaces, or download endpoints.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-hub",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:21",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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