On the Secure Sharing and Aggregation of Data to Support Systems Biology Research

The development of tools and technologies to facilitate appropriate and effective data sharing is becoming increasingly important in many academic disciplines. In particular, the 'data explosion' problem associated with the Life Sciences has been recognised by many researchers and commented upon widely, as have the associated data management problems. In this paper we describe how a middleware framework that supports the secure sharing and aggregation of data from heterogeneous data sources developed initially to underpin the sharing of healthcare-related data-is being used to support Systems Biology research at the University of Oxford. As well as giving an overview of the framework and its application, we attempt to set our work within the wider context of the emerging challenges associated with data sharing within the Life Sciences.