Monday, April 09, 2007

The EU and the DG SANCO

Well I now have the honour of being the parent/patient co-ordinator for a proposal to win new money for "Histio Net" from the EU for rare disease projects under the DG SANCO initiative. This is being lead by some cancer specialists in France who are looking to create a portal to facilitate international collaboration amongst Doctors, scientists and patient/parents and have asked me to help with the conceptualisation of the project. This is quite encouraging because, co-incidentally, "Mediblog" would deliver almost everything they want (such a shame it doesn't exist yet.)

I have only been asked to help with just the patient/parent aspects of the portal and I think the the existing hrtrust site will already do most of it. I'm not sure if all the languages are supported though - which might make it tricky. The HRTrust site will certainly be Ok for a pilot study though.

If you (are sad enough to) read the stuff on the DG SANCO site you will see that the potential market for Liferay (and any other portals of course) in this area could be very large. I did look into the idea of using the SAP Portal (which I know much more about) but the cost would be prohibitive and the benefits of the SAP Portal are only really realised when you use it to integrate with the other SAP applications. Pity, I really like the NetWeaver technology...

I now have loads of crap from the EU to read through, as if I didn't have enough to do.

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