The Multi-Knowledge Service-Oriented Architecture: Enabling Collaborative Research for E-Health

The introduction of e-Health services is facilitating access to healthcare, regardless of geographical location or time, thanks to innovative telemedicine and personal health systems. E-Health is also breaking down many barriers, enabling health service providers (public authorities, hospitals) from different countries to work more closely together. In this context, the Multi-Knowledge platform may be regarded as a milestone, allowing geographically dispersed groups of biomedical researchers, dealing with different data sources as well as technological and organisational contexts, to create, exchange and manipulate new knowledge in a seamless fashion. Moreover, the Multi-Knowledge project defined a methodological framework for research experiments involving heterogeneous data, 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.