The European cancer informatics landscape: Challenges for the biomedical informatics community

This paper critically examines European and global efforts towards developing publicly-accessible interoperable and distributed production systems in the health and life sciences (with a focus on cancer), via ontologies, formal metadata, service oriented architectures, and grid computing models. Significant engineering challenges need to be successfully addressed if we are going to realize our vision of therapies specifically designed to treat each individual’s cancer in highly targeted ways. This paper identifies and discusses a range of such engineering, technological and policy related challenges.