Clinical attribute registry
One governed dictionary for every study - because 24 spellings of radiation therapy is not a vocabulary.
A public audit of 375 cBioPortal studies found the same clinical concept encoded dozens of ways - 24 distinct encodings of radiation therapy alone - and the tooling to prevent it does not exist: MSK's Clinical Data Dictionary is explicitly advisory, and validateData.py validates one study at a time, never consistency across studies. This recipe builds the missing piece: a governed clinical attribute dictionary your institution owns. Seed it from your best-curated study's headers, refine it (datatypes, descriptions, display names, priorities, allowed values as taxonomies), bind attributes to NCIt terms via ontology suggestions a human confirms - then audit every other study's headers against the same dictionary, so each divergent id, retype, or missing description surfaces as a named finding instead of an archaeology project. Headers only: no patient data ever leaves your site.