Simplifying access to large-scale health care and life sciences datasets

Abstract

Within the health care and life sciences (HCLS) domain, a plethora of phenomena exists that range across the whole "vertical scale" of biomedicine. To accurately research and describe those phenomena, a tremendous amount of highly heterogeneous data have been produced and collected with various research methodologies encompassing the genetic, molecular, tissue, and organ level. An initial step to provide researchers with access to this data has been through creating integrated views on existing and open biomedical datasets published on the Web. In order to make the next step, we need to now create easy-to-use yet powerful applications that enable researchers to efficiently query, integrate and analyze those datasets. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.