Grid infrastructures supporting paediatric endocrinology across Europe

Abstract

Paediatric endocrinology is a highly specialised area of clinical medicine with many experts with specific knowledge distributed over a wide geographical area. The European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology (ESPE) is an example of such a body of experts that require regular collaboration and sharing of data and knowledge. This paper describes work, developed as a corollary to the VOTES project [1] and implementing similar architectures, to provide a data grid that allows information to be efficiently distributed between collaborating partners, and also allows wide-scale analyses to be run over the entire data-set, which necessarily involves crossing domain boundaries and negotiating data access between administrations that only trust each other to a limited degree