Enabling biomedical data analysis workflows: the Multi-Knowledge collaborative platform

The objective of the Multi-Knowledge project is the development and validation of a collaborative IT platform for knowledge management, allowing geographically dispersed groups of researchers, dealing with different data sources as well as technological and organisational contexts, to create, exchange and manipulate new knowledge in a seamless fashion. The ambition is also to define a methodological framework that can easily be extended to include additional sources of knowledge and expertise (biomedical data, images, environmental data), and can be applied to wider sectors of medical research. After two years of work, the Multi-Knowledge platform is almost complete and the second pilot experiment is being carried out. In this paper we describe the Multi-Knowledge project, starting from user requirements which have driven the development process, then going into details of the different modules which compose the platform, and finally illustrating the experiments which are being conducted across different sites.