Information grids: managing and mining semantic data in a grid infrastructure; open issues and application to geno-medical data

Over these last eight years, computing grids have received an increasing attention both from the scientific community and the major industrial companies. Computing grids propose a very effective, economic and scalable way to build high performance infrastructures. More recently, attempts have been done to open grids to other application fields. Indeed grids appear as a promising candidate infrastructure paradigm for managing applications distributed over a MAN/WAN and designed to share information and services among users. Thus, besides computing grids, information grids and community grids are now considered with a very high interest. In this perspective, by their very demanding requirements and their socioeconomic impact, biomedical applications are certainly one of the most pertinent domain for using grids. However, grids still lack most of the data management tools mandatory to pretend to implement semantically rich applications like biomedical applications. In this position paper, we first draw a global picture of our target biomedical applications. Then, we focus on open issues regarding geno-medical information grids, i.e. regarding the management and mining of geno-medical data in distributed and heterogeneous grid infrastructures. Finally, we propose a candidate generic architecture for managing and processing geno-medical data on a grid and describe its main components.