Pangea-LE: a non-invasive lightweight biomedical data integration engine

Healthcare is a very data-intensive sector, producing and consuming a great amount of biomedical information. In healthcare organizations, especially hospitals, the big amount of data gets increasingly obscure due to their decentralized organization which has allowed different departments to meet specific or local requirements. This has led to fragmented and heterogeneous data resources, so called islands of information, which contain biomedical data about patients. Access and aggregation of data across systems results very difficult. This situation has created a large gap between the potential and actual value of biomedical data stored in healthcare systems. In order to reduce that gap giving easy access to those amounts of hidden data, we present here an overview of the Pangea-LE system, emphasising its flexibility and quick organisation deployment process. Background Data integration is the problem of combining data residing at different sources and providing the user with a unified view of these data [1]. This unified view may be created from a set of existing data repositories in order to facilitate information access through a single information access point, or when a certain information need arises it may be constructed by combining different bu