Incorporating commercial and private data into an open linked data platform for drug discovery

Abstract

The Open PHACTS Discovery Platform aims to provide an integrated information space to advance pharmacological research in the area of drug discovery. Effective drug discovery requires comprehensive data coverage, i.e. integrating all available sources of pharmacology data. While many relevant data sources are available on the linked open data cloud, their content needs to be combined with that of commercial datasets and the licensing of these commercial datasets respected when providing access to the data. Additionally, pharmaceutical companies have built up their own extensive private data collections that they require to be included in their pharmacological dataspace. In this paper we discuss the challenges of incorporating private and commercial data into a linked dataspace: focusing on the modelling of these datasets and their interlinking. We also present the graph-based access control mechanism that ensures commercial and private datasets are only available to authorized users. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.