Although all three test beds involve some aspect of neuroimaging, the problems that they are addressing are common throughout biomedical research and the solutions will be applicable outside the individual fields represented in the test beds. For example, BIRN is using these initial test bed studies to drive the construction and daily use of a federated data sharing environment that presents biological data held at geographically separate sites as a single, unified database. To this end, the BIRN program is rapidly producing tools and technologies that enable the aggregation of data from virtually any laboratory's research program to the BIRN data federation system, independent of the biological problem being addressed.

Lessons learned and best practices are continuously collected and made available to help new collaborative efforts make efficient use of this infrastructure
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