A semantic grid services architecture in support of efficient knowledge discovery from multilevel clinical and genomic datasets

This paper presents the architectural considerations of the Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer (ACGT) project aiming at delivering a European Biomedical Grid in support of efficient knowledge discovery in the context of post-genomic clinical trials on cancer. Our main research challenge in ACGT is the requirement to develop an infrastructure able to produce, use, and deploy knowledge as a basic element of advanced applications, which will mainly constitute a Biomedical Knowledge Grid. Our approach to offer semantic modelling of available services and data sources to support high level services and dynamic services for discovery and composition will be presented. In particular, ontologies and metadata are the basic elements through which Grid intelligence services can be developed, and the current achievements of the project in this domain will be discussed.