The digital library services are hosted on the Biomed Town community portal and can be accessed from www.physiomespace.com. PhysiomeSpace is currently a totally free service which offers up to 1GB of space: anyone interested in experimenting this innovative approach can register to the BiomedTown portal and use this service under the license agreement that can be found at www.physiomespace.com/public/TermsOfUse. PhysiomeSpace is easy to use: just with few clicks users can manage and curate the existing data resources, upload new ones and eventually share them with other users, following a simply permission system which ensure reliability and control.
PhysiomeSpace is in the process to release the Living Human Digital Library (LHDL) multiscale musculoskeletal data collection that provides a unique systematic quantification of morphological and functional aspects of the musculoskeletal system, at a range of dimensional scales from the whole body down to the tissue constituents. The originality of the collection is that all data corresponds to the same body and are registered into a multiscale hierarchy defined in a global reference framework. The full data collection will be progressively released with a cadence of two weeks, starting from June 29th 2010 and when entirely published will constitute one of the most extensive data collection publicly available of this kind.
About PhysiomeSpace Service
The digital library service is managed using a client–server approach. The client application, called
PSLoader© is used to import, fuse and enrich the data information according to the PhysiomeSpace resource
ontology and but also to upload and download the resources to the library.
A search service capitalizes on the domain ontology and on the enrichment of metadata for each resource, providing a powerful discovery environment. The metadata are described in an extensible ontology composed of a master ontology and a series of sub-ontologies which can be added by the users’ communities, depending on their needs. If you wish to learn how to use the service you can download the PhysiomeSpace guide from www.physiomespace.com/wikis.
About LHDL project
The Living Human Digital Library (LHDL) research project (www.livinghuman.org, FP6-2004-ICT-
026932) was a STREP Project co-funded by the European Commission's as part of the 6th Framework
Programme. The project, under the scientific coordination of the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli (IOR, Italy),
run for three years from February 2006 to February 2009 and saw the participation of the University of
Bedfordshire (U.K.), the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium), the Open University (U.K.) and the
CINECA supercomputing centre (Italy).
About LHDL collection
The collection, generated by researchers at ULB and IOR, is based on two female cadavers obtained from the ULB donation program, and on a group of body-matched volunteers recruited at IOR. The data collection
included very different activities starting from the body level to scale down to organ, tissue, sub
tissue and cell level. Full details on the LHDL Data collection can be found:
http://www.biomedtown.org/biomed_town/LHDL/Reception/lhp-public-repository/public_D/plfng_view.
A complete description of the methods used to collect the various data types can be found: http://www.biomedtown.org/biomed_town/LHDL/Reception/collection/.