Illustration shows how different puzzle pieces come together to create a picture of a bridge. This offers an analogy for how different datasets come together through harmonization. Distributed data are aggravated and then integrated. This process allows individual data with different conceptual frameworks to be joined together (through large-scale indexing frameworks and consistent identifiers) to identify gaps and to allow for better analysis, both by humans and machines.

credit: Melissa Haendel, Ph.D. and Julie McMurry, MPH