A generic, service-based data integration framework applied to linking drugs & clinical trials

This paper presents an integrated framework, the Vienna Cloud Environment, for building a generic, service-based data infrastructure for biomedical data integration needs. The infrastructure consists of diverse service types, which in an example scenario are used to expose and link several open drug and clinical trials data sources under a unified interface. As a result, the biomedical research community is offered a convenient way to query parameters related to drugs, for example generic compound names or brand names or their molecular targets, and associate these to their effective utilization in clinical trials. We develop and discuss several approaches on setting up such integration infrastructure and discuss implications of this framework exemplarily on an experimental evaluation of the drug-trial integration application. Practical recommendations and theoretical considerations inspired by the implementation and experimental evaluation of the drug-trials integration application are presented. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.