Dynamic Access Control Management for Distributed Biomedical Data Resources

Abstract

With increasingly dispersed and inhomogeneous resources, sharing knowledge, information or data becomes more and more difficult and manageable for both end-users and providers. To reduce administrative overheads and ease time-consuming management tasks, quite a few solutions for secure data sharing and access have been designed and introduced in several research projects worldwide. In this paper, we focus on the EU-funded research project ViroLab, which tries to build a virtual laboratory that allows health professionals to access distributed data resources in order to perform clinical studies and analyses on the requested data sets. The paper concentrates on the approach and implementation how data sharing in ViroLab is carried out and how these biomedical resources can be easily managed to guarantee the highest level of protection against any abuse. We conclude with an outlook and recommendations on how the system can be enhanced and improved.