The objective of Clinical and Translational Science (CTS) is to reduce the time-to-practice of biomedical scientific discoveries, and the time-to-research of clinical and community health care issues. The guiding mission of the Biomedical Informatics Infrastructure (BII) is to provide the information technology infrastructure and informatics services to support the many-way translation of research between the bench, the bedside, and the community. It will create networks across silos to break the silos. This infrastructure and the services offered recognize the need for data integration across platforms and over time. They recognize the need to support basic bench research, clinical trials, and community health investigations. Built with the goals of supporting research work flow, researcher networks, and researcher-resources networks, the scalable and adaptable architecture and services must provide an easy avenue for researchers, along with informatics expertise, for focused functionality build out. The Biomedical Informatics Infrastructure will be, in addition to being a technological infrastructure, a social, psychological, organizational, and educational one as well. The proposed system will by its very design restructure work groups and cause stress to the organization, its social groups, and individuals. Appropriate education, consultation, training, change management, evaluation, and assessment services are critical for the success of BII. We present the BII capabilities as a menu with four columns, each representing a dimension of its capabilities, namely: (a) the different domains of integration central to CTS, (b) the different functions required of the infrastructure, (c) the resources available for CTS, and (d) the informatics services for CTS. The categories within each dimension can be concatenated, with the conjunctive phrases/words preceding the columns, to form sentences that describe all the capabilities of the BII. Integrating all the capabilities, the ideal BII is a combination of Google (TM), Facebook (TM), Amazon (TM), and Orbitz (TM) - the four systems, which have revolutionized consumer informatics
