RICORDO

The Virtual Physiological Human network represents an active and diverse community of biomedical scientists that studies human biology by computational means. This diversity is the basis for an impressive breadth of scientific approaches, and emergent technologies, as well as potentially shareable resources such as data and models. Although in principle, the resources generated are re-usable, in practice, few can currently be shared. A key reason for this disparity stems from the lack of consistent cataloguing, annotation and accessibility of VPH data and models (VPHDMs). The creation of a communal annotation strategy that supports the interoperability of VPHDMs across different biological scales (known as vertical integration), in such a way that is clinically relevant, is a fundamental goal for the VPH community. For this objective to be achieved, a community standard for the representation of multiscale biological entities represented across VPHDMs must be studied and tested carefully. To this end, this project will take a key step in prototyping a multiscale anatomy standard, and demonstrate its effectiveness in connecting patient specific radiological images to mathematical models of physiology, as well as to related genomic and molecular data. VPH data and model resources vary in type, complexity and accessibility. Therefore, the technical infrastructure that complements such an annotation strategy, and supports the interoperability of distributed VPH resources, will also be prototyped in this project.The outcome of this work will contribute a resource interoperability plan to the VPH's Toolkit Development Plan.