A human grid initiative.
Tools used by the initiative
The portal
The portal is a great tool of communication and information and is the unique entry to reach other services, like the Knowledge Base. It gives the opportunity to announce news or events and to share the last information about healthgrids advances or about other related projects.
- It was created following the Community requests and needs like:
- news system
- information share on different events
- a private space to talk about specific topics
This great tool makes the choice possible between several and different tools. Moreover, it gives now to the members the opportunity to discover more about the initiatives, vision and objectives.
The Knowledge Base
The Knowledge Base is a real efficient and easy-use tool and is open to promote projects and events into the healthcare sector and biomedical research. It is acting as a basis for improving coordination amongst the funding bodies. It provides a specific framework for exchanging best practices and experience and translates well the idea of defining a structured collection of records of data.
The Knowledge Base will overall be used to roadmap the challenges to come. Following the e-Health action plan, the Knowledge Base will provide a specific framework for exchanging best practices and experience, and enables common approaches to shared problems to be developed over time. This action plan in question wants to develop two vital points which are maximising new information and communication technologies in health sector and integrating a range of e-Health policies and activities.
- The Knowledge Base will also act as a basis for improving coordination amongst funding bodies, health policy makers and leaders of Grid initiatives, avoiding legislative barriers. In that case, the proposed project will therefore:
- develop a comprehensive compendium of national and EU initiatives including an analysis of strengths;
- identify common interests, co-operation incentives and collaboration among the funding authorities, to facilitate pooling of results, best practice and evaluation methods, as well as a more coherent approach towards standardisation and international collaboration.
The Wiki
A wiki is first of all a collaborative website allowing the link among any number of pages, which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. The HealthGrid wiki is inspired from the best known wiki tool in the world: wikipedia, which use is the same.
This efficient and easy-use tool is part of the HealthGrid portal and is available online enabling the distribution of knowledge and data. This enables also collaborative work and allows an important mass collaborative authoring by adding, removing or editing content. In other words, any member interested in the HealthGrid initiative can join in by simply signing in and may enrich, change, modify or complete the articles that the wiki is made of.
Thanks to the Wiki, it becomes easy to make research and to exchange knowledge with other concerned people through articles or other complementary texts.
The Code Repository
At the same level as the Wiki or the Knowledge Base, the TRAC SVN (also called Code Repository or Code Factory) is a great tool to use in research and studies in the biomedical sector.
First of all the Trac SVN is an open source and allows the users to keep track of changes made over time to any type of electronic data. Subversion, which is by the way a state-of-the-art centralised Revision Control System, is available through the Trac SVN.
The latter is made of a tree of files that is placed into a central repository, working more like a normal server, except that it remembers every change ever made to the files and directories. This tool is then working like the Wiki allowing the distribution of data and other articles, but let appear at the same time who has done what. In this way, it allows recovering older versions of data or examines the history of how the data had changed.
Come and use it to get better results in your research.