Integrating and accessing medical data resources within the ViroLab Virtual Laboratory

This paper presents the data access solutions which have been developed in the ViroLab Virtual Laboratory infrastructure to enable medical researchers and practitioners to conduct experiments in the area of HIV treatment. Such experiments require access to a number of geographically distributed data sets (residing at various hospitals) with heavy focus on integration and security issues. Scientists conducting virtual experiments need to be able to manipulate such distributed data in a consistent and secure manner. We describe the main components of the Virtual Laboratory framework being devoted to data access and explain how data is processed in the presented environment.