Integration of biomedical data using federated databases

Abstract

The expansion of biomedical knowledge, reduction in computing costs and spread of IT facilities have conducted to an escalation of the biomedical electronic data. However, these data are rarely integrated and analysed because of the insufficiency of specialised tools. This paper presents a pilot system that will be used in the European FP7 DebugIT project to integrate biomedical data from several healthcare centres across Europe. The system aims at solving complex problems derived from the technical and semantic heterogeneity intrinsic to these kinds of data sources as well as from the absence of reliability of the distributed system.