The NCRI Informatics Initiative has been established with the goal of using informatics to maximise the impact of cancer research. A clear foundation to achieving this goal is to enable the development of an informatics platform in the UK that facilitates access to, and movement of, data generated from research funded by NCRI Partner organisations, across the spectrum from genomics to clinical trials. To assure the success of such a system, an initial project has been defined to establish and document the requirements for the platform and to construct and validate the key information models around which the platform will be built. The platform will need to leverage many projects, tools and resources including those generated by many e-Science projects. It also required contributing to the development of a global platform through a close interaction with similar efforts being developed by the NCI in the USA.

Our engagement with this project relates strongly to our interest in the development of large-scale distributed systems and to our continuing exploration of the relationship between requirements and architectures. In this context this project is a testbed for new techniques. It is also, critically, part of our collective contribution to defeating cancer which has taken the lives of our friends and family.

Prof. Anthony Finkelstein

• Dr Leah Goldin
• Dr Vito Perrone

• <link http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk>Imperial College, Dept. of Computing</link>
• <link http://www.ncri.ac.uk>National Cancer Research Institute</link>
• <link http://www.ebi.ac.uk>European Bioinformatics Institute</link>

This project is funded by Cancer Research UK. UCL is the lead partner.