GLAS-PPE/2009-21

Supporting Security-oriented, Inter-disciplinary Research: Crossing the Social, Clinical and Geospatial Domains

R.O. Sinnott(1), T. Doherty(1), C. Higgins(4), P.S. Lambert(3), S. McCafferty(1), A.Stell(1), K.L.L. Tan(2), K. J. Turner(2), J.P. Watt(1)

(1) National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ
(2) Dept. of Computing Science & Mathematics, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA
(3) Dept. of Applied Social Science, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA
(4) EDINA, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 1PR

How many people have had a chronic disease for longer than 5-years in Scotland? How has this impacted upon their employment? Are there any geographical clusters in Scotland where a high-incidence of patients with such long-term illness can be found? How does the life expectancy of such individuals compare with the national averages? Such questions are important to understand the health of nations and the best ways in which health care should be delivered and measured for their impact and success. In tackling such research questions, e-Infrastructures need to provide tailored, secure access to an extensible range of distributed resources including, amongst others, primary and secondary e-Health clinical data; social science data; and geospatial data. In this paper we describe the security models underlying these e-Infrastructures and demonstrate their implementation in supporting secure, federated access to a variety of distributed and heterogeneous data sets, exploiting the results of a variety of projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow.


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