Requirements for data integration

15 Biomedical research networks need to integrate research data among their members and with 16 external partners. To support such data sharing activities, adequate information technology 17 infrastructure is necessary. To facilitate the establishments of such an infrastructure, we 18 developed a reference model for requirements. The reference model consists of five reference 19 goals and 15 reference requirements. Using the Unified Modeling Language, the goals and 20 requirements are set into relation to each other. In addition, all goals and requirements are 21 described textually in tables. This reference model can be used by research networks as a 22 basis for the resource efficient acquisition of their project specific requirements. Further, a 23 concrete instance of the reference model is described for a research network on liver cancer. 24 The reference model is transferred into a requirements model of the specific network. Based 25 on this concrete requirements model, a service-oriented information technology architecture is 26 derived and also described in this paper. 27