Western Regional Biomedical Collaboratory

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The University of Wyoming, in cooperation with Farragut Systems, Inc. and established research university partners in the Western United States, will create a comprehensive strategic plan for the Western Regional Biomedical Collaboratory, or WRBC. The mission of the WRBC will be to build upon human and technological infrastructure developed through prior and ongoing NIH support to create a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration in biomedical research among several universities in the Western United States. The long-term goal for the WRBC will be to provide tools and technology for (1) sharing information and knowledge among the participating institutions, (2) searching, visualizing, and manipulating information using context-appropriate information management techniques, and (3) supporting communication and collaboration among researchers in the biomedical sciences at these institutions. This two-year project will result in a comprehensive, written plan for establishing and maintaining biomedical research collaborations across the western region. This program will bring together representatives from each of the participating research institutions, along with experienced information systems developers and experts from the IAIMS community, to assess the needs of biomedical researchers in the network and develop a plan to facilitate information sharing and research among them. Policies and strategies for encouraging and supporting such collaboration will be addressed in the plan. The planning program will also support the development of a prototype distributed information management system that will provide context-appropriate information to support effective searching, sharing, and stewardship of research data and related documents such as published or in-press papers, technical reports, etc. This prototype will link research information to standardized descriptors that can be easily searched by authorized users in a variety of problem-specific ways. The prototype will be used by the planners and researchers in the network to evaluate the needs of researchers for locating and sharing research knowledge and developing collaborative relationships with colleagues at geographically dispersed sites.