Collaboratories on the Grid, A. Tirado-Ramos, Collaborative Software Architectures for Interactive Biomedical Applications, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, June 2007.

Background: The most important goal in Biomedical Informatics is to advance the quality of health care and the breadth and depth of its reach in society. Working towards the purpose of covering the whole healthcare spectrum, from prevention to treatment to rehabilitation, experts in the field have been focusing in the last few years on complex issues such as large-scale data integration and resource interoperability [116,136]. These new foci of research are causing a technological revolution in the field, where unprecedented amounts of biomedical digital information produced by data-intensive applications are rapidly changing the way computer scientists think about and design sofware architectures.