Big Data Driving Data Integration at the NIH by David Linthicum.
From the post:
The National Institutes of Health announced new grants to develop big data technologies and strategies.
“The NIH multi-institute awards constitute an initial investment of nearly $32 million in fiscal year 2014 by NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative and will support development of new software, tools and training to improve access to these data and the ability to make new discoveries using them, NIH said in its announcement of the funding.”
The grants will address issues around Big Data adoption, including:
- Locating data and the appropriate software tools to access and analyze the information.
- Lack of data standards, or low adoption of standards across the research community.
- Insufficient polices to facilitate data sharing while protecting privacy.
- Unwillingness to collaborate that limits the data’s usefulness in the research community.
Among the tasks funded is the creation of a “Perturbation Data Coordination and Integration Center.” The center will provide support for data science research that focuses on interpreting and integrating data from different data types and databases. In other words, it will make sure the data moves to where it should move, in order to provide access to information that’s needed by the research scientist. Fundamentally, it’s data integration practices and technologies.
This is very interesting from the standpoint that the movement into big data systems often drives the reevaluation, or even new interest in data integration. As the data becomes strategically important, the need to provide core integration services becomes even more important.
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The NIH announcement. NIH invests almost $32 million to increase utility of biomedical research data, reads in part:
Wide-ranging National Institutes of Health grants announced today will develop new strategies to analyze and leverage the explosion of increasingly complex biomedical data sets, often referred to as Big Data. These NIH multi-institute awards constitute an initial investment of nearly $32 million in fiscal year 2014 by NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, which is projected to have a total investment of nearly $656 million through 2020, pending available funds.
With the advent of transformative technologies for biomedical research, such as DNA sequencing and imaging, biomedical data generation is exceeding researchers’ ability to capitalize on the data. The BD2K awards will support the development of new approaches, software, tools, and training programs to improve access to these data and the ability to make new discoveries using them. Investigators hope to explore novel analytics to mine large amounts of data, while protecting privacy, for eventual application to improving human health. Examples include an improved ability to predict who is at increased risk for breast cancer, heart attack and other diseases and condition, and better ways to treat and prevent them.
And of particular interest:
BD2K Data Discovery Index Coordination Consortium (DDICC). This program will create a consortium to begin a community-based development of a biomedical data discovery index that will enable discovery, access and citation of biomedical research data sets.
Big data driving data integration. Who knew? 😉
The more big data the greater the pressure for robust data integration.
Sounds like they are playing the topic maps tune.