Introduction
The SERPent project represents an opportunity to significantly improve the design and management of epidemiological studies within UCL. A collection of data managers, epidemiologists and software developers have agreed to work together on this short project to establish whether an existing standard, the Data Documentation Initiative, with its associated tools represents a viable mechanisms to represent study metadata. A selection of epidemiological studies have been selected that represent a broad range of representative work that is carried out within this group. These studies represent both large scale, long-term data collection and short term, focused designs. They range from purely clinical data collection to the examiniation of a wide range of social and economic indices.