A FAIR and federated repository prototype for multimodal Home-Cage Monitoring biomedical data

Home-Cage Monitoring (HCM) produces vast, multimodal datasets whose reuse is critically limited by data fragmentation, proprietary formats, and inconsistent metadata. To address this reproducibility bottleneck while respecting institutional data governance, we present a working prototype of a novel, decoupled, federated repository architecture aligned with the FAIR principles. The core solution separates a local Data Plane (Solid Pods), responsible for secure storage and storage-level access control (WAC/ACP), from a Control Plane (Node Control Service via API Platform), which manages validation (MNMS and SHACL shapes) and metadata exposure. Federation is achieved through DCAT-compliant catalogue endpoints that enable Zero-Copy Federation: only standardized metadata is harvested by a central portal for global discovery, ensuring raw data always remains under the originating institution’s control. This architecture provides a scalable framework for validated data ingestion, semantic interoperability, and cross-site search, transforming multimodal HCM data into a reusable community asset.