Semantically Based Data Integration Environment for Biomedical Research

This paper presents an overview of the data integration mediation system developed as part of the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN; http://www.nbirn.net) project. BIRN is sponsored by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A core BIRN goal is the development of a multi-institution information management system to support biomedical research. Each participating institution maintains a database of their experimental or computationally derived data, and the data integration system performs semantic integration over the databases to enable researchers to perform analyses based on larger and broader datasets than would be available from any single institution's data. This demonstration paper describes architecture, implementation, and capabilities of the semantically based data integration system for BIRN