Mr. Jason Bond¹ is the lead software engineer of a team specialising in the development of software applications for the biomedical industry.

He and his team are developing a data-finding program that they believe will significantly enhance the efficiency of medical and biological research. Their multi-threaded software application, called ‘Med.NET’, can process vast quantities of biomedical data in order to find and retrieve information vital to research endeavours. The application is an amalgamation of software engineering, informatics, clinical practice, and medical research methodology, which he thinks could revolutionise the future biomedical data acquisition and management.

Med.Net serves as a kind of portal to a number of biomed databases. Jason has a list of these sources within the Med.Net software. However Med.Net also regularly queries the global registries network for new biomed data sources that support the MedSearch query protocol. The global registries network provides a list of new resources as well as the query protocol and the standard vocabularies supported by each data source. These resources are easily integrated with the existing pool of Med.Net data sources and make the application automatically extensible.

Global Registries and Med.Net engage in sophisticated machine-to-machine exchanges within a service oriented architecture.

By using the Global Registries network Med.Net taps into the expanding ocean of information ”in the cloud” and aggregates it into new datasets specific to the business needs of its clients. Bond is confident that he has an application that can grow and evolve in line with the Web and the vast number of data collections coming on line.

While Med.NET is a standalone application, it is also designed to search for all relevant research outputs and collaborators registered with the Global Registries. This international register serves as a global aggregation of information on data collections, investigators, and collaborations from a vast range of sources from all over the world. Med.Net represents the new breed of ‘Web 2.0’ software that embraces the near-limitless connectivity of the Internet and intelligent syndicated searching.

¹ Jason Bond is a fictional persona, as are all others described here. Image Disclaimer: All images of people are sourced from Flickr under the Creative Commons licence and are for illustrative purposes only.

²http://www.stress-free.co.nz/searching_across_websites_with_opensearch

³ http://opensearch.a9.com/-/company/opensearch.jsp