Paper 8
A Secured Collaborative Model for Data Integration in Life SciencesAuthors: |
AbstractLife Sciences research extensively and routinely use external online databases, tools and applications for the implementation of computational pipelines. These applications are among the truly distributed and highly collaborative global systems in existence. Since the resources these applications use are designed to serve individual users, they adopt an all-or-nothing model in which users necessarily have to accept the entire response even though only a fraction of the response is relevant. In computational pipelines involving several databases and complex repeat operations, costs due to unnecessary data transmissions and computations could be significant enough to reduce productivity and make the applications sluggish. Since these resources are autonomous, and do not accept user instructions or queries, users are not able to customize their behavior in order to reduce network latency and wasteful computation or data transmission. Obviously, such a resource utilization and sharing model is wasteful and expensive. In this paper, our goal is to propose a new collaborative data integration and computational pipeline execution model for systems biology research. We show that in our envisioned model, arbitrary sites are able to accept user constraints and limited processing instructions to avoid wasteful computation resulting in improved overall efficiency. We also demonstrate that the proposed collaborative model does not breach site security or infringe upon its autonomy. |