WP2 - Security, ethical and legal issues
The objectives of this workpackage are:
• To guarantee that all ethical and legal issues related to the project are satisfied, while fulfilling all relevant security, ethical and legal requirements
• To define and develop methods for the overall management of security and control of research data and the controlling of access rights.

WP3 - Dissemination & Exploitation
The aim of this Workpackage is to ensure that the project and its outcomes will be widely known and verify their exploitation potential. The strategic objective of WP3 is to exploit already established & mature dissemination instruments and methods in order to widely promote and distribute project’s outcomes while at the same time prepare the ground for ASSIST exploitation. Major vehicle for the entire Dissemination and Exploitation process will be the compilation and continuous update of the “Plan for Using and Disseminating Knowledge” (PUDK).

WP4 - User Requirements - System Specifications
The ASSIST project follows the life cycle of a design and development procedure. In that sense WP4 contains all the necessary actions required in order to systematically collect ASSIST users' requirements and transform them into specifications for the subsequent development tasks. In addition, WP4 interacts with WP10 providing verification and validation tasks during the whole cycle of the project.

WP5 - Medical Knowledge Base
The Medical Knowledge Base (M.K.B.) is one of the system’s core components providing the ability to perform medical queries at a semantic level by discovering associations between medical records with different syntactic features (measurements, examination results etc.) thus allowing efficient unification and search within distributed medical repositories. The M.K.B. is essentially a database containing structured information corresponding to medical expertise, i.e. definitions of medical entities, the relations between them and Medical Implication Rules.
The main objective of WP5 is to construct a knowledge base of this type, containing information regarding cervical cancer. This objective decomposes into:
• the definition of the structures required to represent medical knowledge,
• the adoption of appropriate languages and formats necessary for efficient storage and exploitation of such knowledge in the ASSIST system and
• the instantiation of a M.K.B. for the domain of cervical cancer.

WP6 - Inference Engine
Given a hypothesis (in a form of a query) that needs to be validated, the ASSIST system must be able to access information contained in the participating medical archives in uniform manner, process relevant records, perform statistical analysis and apply data mining techniques on the collected data and produce meaningful results.
The inference engine plays a critical role in all of the above stages:
• Medical entities are identified within the given medical data by exploiting the information contained in the M.K.B. effectively associating records containing different syntactic information and
• statistical analysis and data mining techniques are applied on the collected data to produce the desired results. In this work package, the inference engine will be designed and implemented in order to perform these tasks.

WP7 - Interfacing to Medical Archives
Since different medical repositories use a variety of modalities and formats to represent medical information, perform different sets of examinations etc., interfaces to these repositories will be implemented in WP7 that:
• Provide a means for each repository to receive a query in a form compatible to its structure and organization
• Maintain an index located to each repository that will associate medical entities with patient records
(i) Implement a software mechanism composed by layers that will control transfer of information from the medical archives to the system and vice-versa, effectively allowing or restricting access according to the requirements and specifications of Tasks 4.1 and 4.2.
(ii) Implement a secure transaction mechanism that will provide the highest possible security regarding the data residing in the participating repositories and the information transferred.

WP8 - User Interfaces
In order to allow system’s users (mainly medical researchers and medical experts) to exploit the systems capabilities in a user friendly manner, a set of graphical user interfaces will be developed that provide all the functionality of the ASSIST system in a manner easy for users to perceive without any need to study detailed documentation and language syntax. However, formal languages for expressing queries, medical hypotheses and for the update of the M.K.B. constitute required underlying implementation elements and will also be developed.

WP9 - Integration
ASSIST targets the production of a prototype system (with possible variants) ready for the market.
Hence integration is a critical stage of the project including all final tests, and polishing of the product. Integration will be in close relation to the actions of WP10 (the use of the system for research regarding association studies related to cervical cancer) since they will provide the ground for validation and verification.

WP10 - Evaluation and Validation
In this work package, ASSIST services will be evaluated in three clinical sites (Germany, Greece and Belgium) where the users, medical researchers, will evaluate the services acceptability, effectiveness and cost-benefits. More specifically, this work package aims to:
• Test and evaluate the predefined set of ASSIST services.
• Demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of ASSIST concept in clinical research by running association studies using patient data from three clinics.