One of the challenges in carrying out bio-molecular research is that relevant data is distributed across many heterogeneous data sources. The trial-specific data includes imaging data, DNA microarray, and clinical data reported on Case Report Forms. Next to that, bio-informaticians need to access data stored in public bio-molecular databases such as Swiss-Prot, KEGG, and GEO. These databases use different access protocols, data formats, query mechanisms, schemas, identifiers, ontologies, etc. The ACGT platform uses data access services to hide the syntactic differences of the databases from other web services and end-users.
The ACGT platform currently contains data access services for the trial-specific databases. The data access services provide a uniform interface for querying the data and for delivering large datasets to temporary storage, where the data can be analyzed by data-mining algorithms. The data access services have recently been fully integrated in the ACGT security framework, ensuring that only authorized users have access to the clinical trial data. Future work focuses on the integration of data from public bio-molecular databases. The challenge here is to provide a unified data access interface that does not needlessly restrict users when accessing the data.
