BIOCHAIN: Towards a platform for securely sharing microbiological data

There is a need to persuade public and private entities to share their currently unexposed bio-data banks by preserving ownership and secrecy. The reason is to make available results that can be obtained by massively exploiting the content of such data by modern machine learning approaches. Digital catalogues of data collections are being provided. However, they are not developed to protect private content that may be shared according to privileges assigned by the owners. Here, we present BIOCHAIN, a data-sharing module which will be the basis for a computational platform aimed at performing federated data analysis. The platform is intended to be used by a consortium of private and public institutions in the field of microbiology. BIOCHAIN makes use of blockchain technology to guarantee fairness among entities of the consortium by allowing them to securely share their data.