The PopSciGrid Community Health Data Portal is a proof of concept platform demonstrating how health behavior, policy, and demographic data can be integrated, visualized, and communicated to empower communities and support new avenues of research and policy for cancer prevention and control.
As a prototype for open-data population health research, the PopSciGrid Community Health Data Portal was designed to encourage trans-disciplinary collaboration, data harmonization, and development of new computational methods for disparate health related data. The ultimate goal is to support research that effectively utilizes cyberinfrastructure, leveraging data from 'cells to society' to accelerate knowledge discovery and transform population health.
The original PopSciGrid Portal (Phase I) 
successfully linked nationally representative data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) with economic data using 14 datasets spanning 6 years. Real-time access, analysis, and visualization of tobacco-related information were enabled utilizing spatiotemporal and statistical applications. The current iteration of PopSciGrid Portal (Phase II), in alpha version, includes further enhancement to the communication and visualization capabilities of the portal to better engage communities and public health decision-makers for cancer prevention and control.
Using publically available data available through NCI and data.gov, the Challenge encourages trans-disciplinary teams of entrepreneurs, developers, and health scientists to develop innovative web and mobile applications to enable communities’ use of population data for cancer prevention and control. 
