An abundance of statistical and scientific data exists in the area of clinical and epidemiological studies. Much of this data is distributed across regional, national and international boundaries with different policies on access and usage, and a multitude of different schemata for the data often complicated by the variety of supporting clinical coding schemes. This prevents the wide scale coll...

Public and private packet-switching networks (PSNs) are being developed or planned throughout the world-for example in Canada (DATAPAC), the U.S. (TELENET), France (TRANSPAC), the U.K. (EPSS), Japan (DDX), Spain, Netherlands and others. 7 Such an explosive development of data communications services is one of the means for attaining the near-perfect availability required from future distributed...