At a workshop in NESC, looking at data integration in the Neurosciences.

Very interesting talk from Maryann Martone. She showed a slightly depressing slide describing the aims of the various eScience projects which is basically interchangable between all projects — data heterogeneity, distribution, autonomy. Like other medical research projects that I have heard off, they spent nearly three years getting the data through the various ethical approval committees before they could even think about hosting the data. The requirement for anonymity is important, of course, but the cost is enormous. It’s a pity that this effort can’t be shared for different projects.

Neurobase presented an interesting architecture which looks very like ComparaGRID — they have a set of wrappers mapping into a common relational datamode; essentially ComparGRID does the same thing but with an OWL based model.

Originally published on my old blog site.