Towards a Biomedical Virtual Research Environment

Providing an appropriate level of accessibility to and tracking of data and process elements in large volumes of medical data is essential. Researchers require systems that provide traceability of information through provenance data capture and management to support clinical analyses. A Virtual Research Environment (VRE) in which data sets and workflows are described, captured, managed and instantiated across biomedical applications would provide an ideal platform for supporting collaborative analyses acting as a knowledge repository for research. We propose a solution that aims to provide detailed data and process traceability to support research analysis that is generically applicable across medical systems.