Development of a grid infrastructure for functional genomics

This is a post-print of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science © 2005 Springer; the original publication is available at: http://www.springerlink.comFirst International Workshop on Life Science Grid, LSGRID 2004 Kanazawa, Japan, May 31 - June 1, 2004The BRIDGES project is incrementally developing and exploring database integration over six geographically distributed research sites with the framework of a Wellcome Trust biomedical research project (the Cardiovascular Functional Genomics project) to provide a sophisticated infrastructure for bioinfomaticians. Grid technologies are being used to facilitate this integration. Key issues to be investigated in BRIDGES are data integration and data federation, security, user friendliness, access to large scale computational facilities and incorporation of existing bioinformatics software solutions, both for visualisation as well as analysis of genomic data sets. This paper outlines the initial experiences in applying Grid technologies and outlines the on-going designs put forward to address these issues