Title: A semantic cloud infrastructure for data-intensive medical research

Authors: Yuriy Kaniovskyi; Siegfried Benkner; Chris Borckholder; Steven Wood; Piotr Nowakowski; Alfredo Saglimbeni; Tomas Pariente Lobo

Addresses: Research Group Scientific Computing, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Austria ' Research Group Scientific Computing, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Austria ' Research Group Scientific Computing, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Austria ' Scientific Computing and Informatics, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS, Foundation Trust Sheffield, UK ' Institute of Computer Science, Cyfronet AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland ' CINECA SuperComputing Centre, Casalecchio di Reno, Italy ' Atos Information Technology Company, Madrid, Spain

Abstract: The European virtual physiological human initiative develops a platform, called VPH-Share, for understanding physiological processes in the human body in terms of anatomical structure and biophysical mechanisms. Besides storing, sharing, integrating and linking a wide variety of heterogeneous bio-medical datasets relevant to the VPH community, the project envisions the facilitation of a secure data infrastructure, as well as search and exploration facilities based on semantic technologies. The data infrastructure and management platform are built on top of a hybrid cloud environment. The data management platform offers tools that cover the whole life-cycle of datasets including integration, selection, semantic annotation and publishing datasets as a service. A comprehensive user interface enables end-users to search and to explore bio-medical data with support of semantic technologies, concealing the complexity of the underlying service environment. In this paper we describe the data infrastructure that has emerged in context of the project.

Keywords: biomedical data infrastructure; secure data integration; secure data management; semantic web technologies; virtual physiological human initiative; VPH-I; web service composition; cloud computing; semantic search; semantic exploration; web services; semantic cloud infrastructure; data intensive research; medical research; data security; physiological processes; human body; anatomical structure; biophysical mechanisms; semantic annotation; cloud computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBDI.2015.069091

International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, 2015 Vol.2 No.2, pp.91 - 105

Received: 04 Oct 2014
Accepted: 04 Dec 2014
Published online: 09 May 2015 *

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