Network Meeting - 13 November 2025
- Arie Baak
- Dec 5, 2025
- 2 min read
TOPICS
The networking meeting of the 13th of November covered the following topics:
Welcome & LIFES updates (including new members)
Introductions
Member presentation - Farminform
LIFES Steering Committee & General Assembly meetings
Workstreams agreed with GA
Workstream & core LIFES team schedule
4LifeSupport - ODRL (Open Digitial Rights Language)
Parking lot & close
PRESENTATIONS
Farminform (Idris Mattijssen)
Farminform is a long-standing Dutch not-for-profit data trust that aggregates nationwide pharmaceutical usage data, providing high-quality insights to industry and government while supporting broader, legally compliant collaborations through FEMA. Their services enable essential use cases such as monitoring medication shortages, benchmarking hospital practices, mapping treatment pathways, and supporting clinician-led studies that require nationwide visibility. Key challenges stem from fragmented health data and legal barriers that limit cross-institutional insight, even when data is aggregated. To overcome these obstacles, Farminform increasingly depends on trusted national partners and structured, project-based data collaboration models. LIFES can further strengthen this ecosystem by enabling safe, scalable data “visitability,” aligning stakeholders, and supporting shared principles that accelerate health insights across the Netherlands.
4Medbox (Sander van Boom)
The session outlined the shift “from expression to digital rights to digital expression of rights,” highlighting how FAIR Data Points make metadata findable but still lack clear, machine-readable access conditions. Current licenses provide little usable information for automated access decisions, limiting true reusability. ODRL was presented as a structured solution for encoding rights and constraints, demonstrated through a Paladin project use case where complex research workflows were modeled and validated automatically. A key focus was the development of the shared StationTalk library to provide reusable rights templates across domains. Ongoing work includes embedding policy elements in FAIR Data Points and improving translation between human-readable and machine-readable access rules..
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