LHDL research project

The Living Human Digital Library research project is partially supported by the European Commission as part of the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme. The project runs for 3 years from February 2006 until January 2009.

The overall objective of LHDL is the development of interactive digital library services that should make easier to share and to access collections of complex biomedical data relative to the musculoskeletal system. The main outputs of the LHDL project are:

• LHP Collection: A large collection of raw and processed data, collected from two cadavers, on the anatomo-functional characteristics of the human musculoskeletal system at dimensional scales spanning from the whole body down to the molecules.
• LhpBuilder: a MAF application that make possible to import and export disparate biomedical data, including medical images, motion data, finite element results, geometries, etc., fuse them in space and time, and store them on the digital library for further use or for sharing with other researchers.
• Living Human Digital Library: the digital library is an infrastructure designed to store, search, retrieve and share within a community of users digital resources useful to the Living Human Project.
• LhpSimul: the Living Human Execution Service are a prototype of a Web Services technology that should make possible to share via the digital library not only data resource, but also service resources, e.g. predictive models.
• Semantic services: each resource stored on the digital library will be annotated with a large number of metadata; these metadata will make possible to search and retrieve resources using semantic constructs, in addition to conventional search method. A broker of semantic web services will make possible to create new services simple as a semantic orchestration of many existing services. Last, but not least, semantic service will make possible the creation of scalable and robust architecture, where backend resources can be added and removed transparently to the user.

These objectives are being pursued by a consortium of five institutions:

• CINECA (CIN): the largest Italian supercomputing centre is the administrative coordinator of the LHDL project, and is in charge of developing LhpBuilder and the Living Human Digital Library.
• "Université Libre De Bruxelles" (ULB): The dept. of Anatomy is in charge of the data collection from cadavers, and of part of the data processing.
• "Istituti Ortopedici Rizzoli" (IOR): IOR is the scientific coordinator of the project. The Laboratorio di Tecnologia Medica is in charge of processing of the data; the Laboratorio di Analisi del Moviemento of the data collection for the associated motion analysis data on volunteers.
• "University of Bedfordshire" (BED): the dept. of computer science contributes to the development of LhpBuilder and is in charge of the development of the LhpSimul execution services.
• "The Open University" (OU): The Knowledge Media Institute lead the development of the Semantic services and of the semantic web service broker.