Case for establishment of BIRN nodes at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester.

We propose to establish two BIRN nodes in the UK. The first will be at the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with the MRC funded Human Genetics Unit (HGU). The second will be at the University of Manchester. The nodes will be used for two purposes (i) to provide a closer link between the Edinburgh and Manchester Bio-informatics groups with BIRN which will lead to greater collaboration and (ii) and evaluation of the BIRN software stack and an assessment of the applicability of OGSA-DAI and UK middleware components for medical imaging and bioinformatics to BIRN. The work will also cover investigation of integration of the BIRN nodes with the data nodes of the UK NGS.