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Thursday, November 3, 2011

BRISSkit - A Vision for Cloud-Based Open Source Research Applications as a Service

The marathon of updates from the NOCRI Information Systems workshops is nearly run - but we couldn't finish without covering a final champion of Open Source and caBIG resources.

Nick Holden, Systems and Database Architect at the Leicester NIHR Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit, gave us a vision as follows:

“The Biomedical Research Informatics Centre for Cardiovascular Science (BRICCS) uses open source applications from around the world to deliver an end-to-end informatics platform for research at the Leicester Cardiovascular BRU.

Now the BRISSkit project aims to build on BRICCS to offer the same applications in a software-as-a-service”

Nick opened by saying that though they wanted to use Open Source, they never wanted to be developers – and that there are downsides to OS in this regard – however, the positives of using open source software for Electronic Data Capture and tissue storage management (OBIBA – open-source biobanking, and caTISSUE, the most successful resource within the caBIG suite) include the potential for data sharing inherent in those platforms e.g. linking up to caGRID for federated secure data querying.

He spoke about the advantages of using these platforms on the cloud (using I2B2 for translational data management, C3PR from caBIG for participant registration) to provide cloud-based research applications as a service! We’d be interested to know if there is anyone out there who would want to take advantage of such a service...

Their project is now aligned to the JISC Managing Research Data workstream.

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