Role of the Informatics Coordination Unit

The main role of the Informatics Coordination Unit is to promote the technological and community cultural advances required to achieve our objectives of researchers being able to share data and tools seamlessly for the benefit of scientific advancement and ultimately patients.

The central core of our work is to liaise with the UK research community to ensure that data generated across different organisations becomes available for others to use. That entails not only encouraging a willingness to publish and share such data, but also the promotion of the existence of such data, and the technical aspects required to make it easy to integrate the data with other resources.

Many of the underlying issues are national and international in nature and a key role of the Unit is to work with our strategic partners to encourage the use of standardised datasets and exchange mechanisms that will eventually allow the linking of different research datasets on a national, and ultimately global, basis.