Lessons from the MEDMI (Medical & Environmental Data: A Mashup Infrastructure) Project on the Challenges in Facilitating Rapid Progress in Understanding of Weather & Health Linkages

Research into linkages between the environment and health are hampered by the lack of common databases and systems for analysing datasets with very different characteristics. The MEDMI (Medical and Environmental Data: A Mashup Infrastructure) project was designed to facilitate easy integration of these data sources that would enable accelerated progress in establishing and testing hypotheses in this area. My presentation will focus on the achievements of the project, particularly with regard to extending previous UK studies on the impacts of high temperatures and the creation of web-based interfaces enabling highly flexible exploratory analysis of potential linkages through the web portal http://www.data-mashup.org.uk. It will also highlight the difficulties encountered and the areas in which the results fell short of expectation.