The NCRI Informatics Initiative is overseeing the implementation of an informatics
framework for the UK cancer research community. The framework advocates an integrated
multidisciplinary method of working between scientific and medical communities. Key to this
process is community adoption of high quality acquisition, storage, sharing and integration of
diverse data elements to improve knowledge of the causes, prevention and treatment of
cancer. The integration of the complex data and meta-data used by these multiple
communities is a significant challenge and there are technical, resource-based and
sociological issues to be addressed. In this paper we review progress aimed at establishing
the framework and outline key challenges in ultra large scale integration of biomedical
computing systems