Towards collaborative data management in the VPH-Share project

The goal of the Virtual Physiological Human Initiative is to provide a systematic framework for understanding physiological processes in the human body in terms of anatomical structure and biophysical mechanisms across multiple length and time scales. In the long term it will transform the delivery of European healthcare into a more personalised, predictive, and integrative process, with significant impact on healthcare and on disease prevention. This paper outlines how the recently funded project VPH-Share contributes to this vision. The project is motivated by the needs of the whole VPH community to harness ICT technology to improve health services for the individual. VPH-Share will provide the organisational fabric (the infostructure), realised as a series of services, offered in an integrated framework, to expose and to manage data, information and tools, to enable the composition and operation of new VPH workflows and to facilitate collaborations between the members of the VPH community.