Middleware architecture approaches for collaborative cancer research

As our ability to capture and generate large biomedical datasets improves, researchers increasingly need to synthesize information using a variety of data types, data systems, and analysis tools. The need for informatics support to facilitate coordinated and federated access to disparate data and analysis resources is more pronounced in collaborative basic, clinical, and translational research studies spanning multiple institutions. This chapter presents a high-level overview of several middleware architecture frameworks and technologies and discusses how these approaches can be employed to address the informatics requirements of large-scale and collaborative cancer research.