Big Data: Applications and Implications Creating large repositories of biomedical data is acknowledged to be critical to making discoveries and creating innovations in biology, medicine, and health care, but is particularly challenging due to the compliance, security, and consent process required. Sometimes large repositories like these are called biomedical commons. In this session, different perspectives are presented on how to build large-scale commons of biomedical data and how to make these available to a broad international community of researchers. The perspectives highlight some of the technical, legal, policy, and behavioral challenges when creating biomedical commons and some of the solutions that the projects discussed have developed. Technical challenges include the management, integration, indexing, analysis, transport, and archiving of petabyte-scale datasets. Legal and policy challenges include integration of data with different consent policies and the harmonization of different national data privacy policies. Other challenges including providing access to a broad community of researchers, not just those at the major research centers, who were the only ones, until recently, who had access to the computational infrastructure required to manage petabyte-size datasets. The perspectives present cases covering regional, national, and international big data biomedical commons projects.