Security-oriented Portals for the Life Sciences

Motivation: The life sciences are broad in scope and cover multiand inter-disciplinary domains as well as the biological domain. These domains can for example involve researchers from the clinical, social, geo-spatial and computer sciences amongst others, e.g. in understanding genetic variations across a population as might be undertaken through a genome-wide association study. Given, this it is essential that portals for these communities are targeted to the individual expertise of the particular domain scientists. Thus tools available to a bioinformatician through a portal might well be meaningless to a social scientist and vice versa. Furthermore certain domains demand that fine-grained access control on data is supported. In this paper we outline how a portfolio of life science related projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow have benefited from security-oriented portals focused upon ease of access, configuration and usage, where data providers are assumed to be autonomous and able to make their own local finegrained access control decisions. We describe the basic technologies that underlie these solutions and outline specific case studies in their application in the areas of depression, self-harm and suicide, and in the area of paediatric endocrinology focusing in particular on rare diseases associated with sex development.