Introduction

Data processing in the pharmaceutical industry is a complex task. In a typical environment, there can be numerous data sources (laboratory equipment, simulations) in various data formats. Data is processed in different ways, by various actor, partly from different organizations.

Processing and storage of the data often relies on numerous different software products. Many are proprietary, specialized solutions are expensive and cannot always keep up with the rapidly evolving state of the art in the pharmaceutical industry. New solutions and data processing algorithms from research (universities and research Institutes) are often not easily usable when data formats or software frameworks are incompatible.

It is therefore the goal of FRIEND to establish a common software platform which achieves wide spread acceptance through free availability and core support for simplified exchange between all parties. Based on a number of innovations, FRIEND allows:

• Cost-effective specialized solutions through comprehensive and deep-reaching extensibility.
• Dedicated adaptability which supports simplified adaption to new or changed requirements.
• The core of the FRIEND system also support for complex data, as it is for example required for genome data.
• These concepts are complemented with support for heterogeneous or distributed data within FRIEND.