| Abstrakt: |
HealthGrid 2008 (http://chicago2008.healthgrid.org) is the sixth conference in this series of open forums for the integration of grid technologies and its applications in the biomedical, medical and biological domains to pave the path to an international research area in healthgrids. The main objective of the HealthGrid conference and the HealthGrid Association is the exchange and discussion of ideas, technologies, solutions and requirements that interest the grid and the life-sciences communities to foster the integration of grids into health. Participation is encouraged for grid middleware and grid applications developers, biomedical and health informatics users and security and policy makers to participate in a set of multidisciplinary sessions with a common concern on the applications to Health. It marks a new level of maturity for this event, migrating for the first time outside Europe to the city of Chicago. HealthGrid's sister organization, HealthGrid.US, has gathered together an impressive array of grid and biomedical informatics experts from both sides of the Atlantic—and beyond—to its conference in Chicago. This is indeed an auspicious occasion: there are similarities and differences between the European and American approaches, from nomenclature – ‘cyberinfrastructure’ in the US and ‘grids’ in Europe – through the variety of healthcare economies to the very style of biomedical research. Each has the potential to benefit the other, and each has the potential to benefit from the other. The conference is an occasion to celebrate differences and to explore points of contact, just as much as it is an occasion to celebrate similarities and to exploit the contrasts. HealthGrid conferences have been organized on an annual basis. The first conference, held in 2003 in Lyon (http://lyon2003.healthgrid.org), reflected the need to involve all actors – physicians, scientists and technologists – who might play a role in the application of grid technology to health, whether healthcare or bio-medical research. The second conference, held in Clermont-Ferrand in January 2004 (http://clermont2004. healthgrid.org), reported research and work in progress from a large number of projects. The third conference in Oxford (http://oxford2005.healthgrid.org) had a major focus on the results and deployment strategies in healthcare. The fourth conference in Valencia (http://valencia2006.healthgrid.org) aimed at consolidating the collaboration among biologists, healthcare professionals and grid technology experts. This fifth conference focused on five pre-eminent domains viewed as application areas for grids in the biomedical field: molecules, cells, organs, individuals, and populations and aimed to show potential users that grids had already gone beyond hype to show concrete applications that demonstrate the success of the technology. As befits a diverse community and a maturing technology, the themes in 2008 reflect the diversity of mature practice: Advancing Virtual Communities, offering a glimpse of the kind of communities that are brought together by means of collaboration grids; Public Health Informatics, exploring the diffusion of grid concepts and technologies in health informatics; Tranlational Bioinformatics, the contact point between medicine, healthcare and genomics; and Knowledge Management and Decision Support, one direction that is confidently expected to grow as the synergy of grids and ‘evidence-based practice’ in healthcare is exploited. Thus, the nineteen papers selected from some 40 submissions of papers, demonstrations and posters have been organized in four sections, complemented by a fifth section of research road maps which relate, mostly indirectly, to keynotes and other events at the conference. In the first section on Advancing Virtual Communities, Andrew Simpson et al. report on the development of a service-oriented interoperability framework, sif, in the context of a broader project, Generic Infrastructure for Medical Informatics (GIMI), which facilitates secure access to data in a variety of forms throughout a collaboration. Andrew Branson et al. address the information integration problem through the provision of an integrated data model with links to and from ontologies to homogenize biomedical data at different levels in the context of the EC Framework 6 Health-e-Child project; they identify clinical requirements and provide a detailed design approach. Nabil Abdennadher et al. expose XWCH, an easy-to-use middleware which they demonstrate can be exploited to gridify applications in such diverse applications as phylogeny inference on one hand and neuron connectivity on the other, thus providing evidence of the adaptability of their approach. M. Diarena et al. describe HOPE, a secure data integration platform taking its inspiration from a number of existing projects and building on EGEE gLite and the metadata catalo [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
