A Seeded Cloud Approach to Health Cyberinfrastructure: Preliminary Architecture Design and Case Applications

Applications in public health and health services require access to a range of heterogeneous data, from environmental information in a region, to population-level data across regions, to more closely held personal health information, and, from reference scientific datasets to observational data and sensor streams. The cyber infrastructure support for such applications must include the ability to access a variety of contextual and background information, along with the tools for integration, analysis, and mining across such datasets. The expected volume of information and users -- including many with only basic skills in data handling and analysis of such systems -- also demands an elastic solution. This paper introduces the "seeded cloud" concept where the on-demand cloud environment includes defined, prepared, and tool-rich datasets, reducing the barrier to application development in this multidisciplinary domain of public health and health services. The seeded cloud architecture is presented and illustrated through two case applications. The implications for discovery-based research as well as practice are discussed.