Title: Metadata based management and sharing of distributed biomedical data

Authors: Fusheng Wang; Cristobal Vergara-Niedermayr; Peiya Liu

Addresses: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA ' Oracle, California, USA ' Department of Integrated Data Systems, Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

Abstract: Biomedical research data sharing is becoming increasingly important for researchers to reuse experiments, pool expertise and validate approaches. However, there are many hurdles for data sharing, including the unwillingness to share, lack of flexible data model for providing context information, difficulty to share syntactically and semantically consistent data across distributed institutions, and high cost to provide tools to share the data. SciPort is a web-based collaborative biomedical data sharing platform to support data sharing across distributed organisations. SciPort provides a generic metadata model to flexibly customise and organise the data. To enable convenient data sharing, SciPort provides a central server based data sharing architecture with a one-click data sharing from a local server. To enable consistency, SciPort provides collaborative distributed schema management across distributed sites. To enable semantic consistency, SciPort provides semantic tagging through controlled vocabularies. SciPort is lightweight and can be easily deployed for building data sharing communities.

Keywords: metadata; scientific data management; data sharing; data integration; computer supported collaborative work; CSCW; distributed data; biomedical data; biomedical research; web-based collaboration; semantic tagging.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2014.059126

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2014 Vol.9 No.1, pp.42 - 57

Received: 26 Dec 2012
Accepted: 03 Oct 2013
Published online: 05 Feb 2014 *

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