Biomedical Research and Integrated Biobanking: An Innovative Paradigm for Heterogeneous Data Management

This doctoral thesisreports on an innovative data repository offering adaptive metadata managementto maximise information sharing and comprehension in multidisciplinary andgeographically distributed collaborations.  It approaches metadata as a fluid,loosely structured and dynamical process rather than a fixed product, anddescribes the development of a novel data management platform based on aschemaless JSON data model, which represents the first fully JSON-basedmetadata repository designed for the biomedical sciences. Results obtainedin various application scenarios (e.g. integrated biobanking, functionalgenomics and computational neuroscience) and corresponding performance testsare reported on in detail. Last but not least, the book offers a systematicoverview of data platforms commonly used in the biomedical sciences, togetherwith a fresh perspective on the role of and tools for data sharing andheterogeneous data integration in contemporary biomedical research.