Security-oriented portals for the life sciences

Abstract

Motivation: The life sciences are broad in scope and cover multi- and inter-disciplinary domains as well as the biological domain. These domains can for example involve researchers from the clinical, social, geo-spatial and computer sciences amongst others, e.g. in understanding genetic variations across a population as might be undertaken through a genome-wide association study. Given, this it is essential that portals for these communities are targeted to the individual expertise of the particular domain scientists. Thus tools available to a bioinformatician through a portal might well be meaningless to a social scientist and vice versa. Furthermore certain domains demand that fine-grained access control on data is supported. In this paper we outline how a portfolio of life science related projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow have benefited from security-oriented portals focused upon ease of access, configuration and usage, where data providers are assumed to be autonomous and able to make their own local fine-grained access control decisions. We describe the basic technologies that underlie these solutions and outline specific case studies in their application in the areas of depression, self-harm and suicide, and in the area of paediatric endocrinology focusing in particular on rare diseases associated with sex development.