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09/12/2006, 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM
Speaker:
Peter Covitz, Chief Operating Officer, National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics.
The mission of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is to relieve suffering and death due to cancer. The strategy for accomplishing this mission is to invest in biomedical research, and consequently the NCI is responsible for approximately one fifth of all biomedical research funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. NCI leadership has determined that the scale of this enterprise has reached a level that demands new, more highly coordinated approaches to informatics resource development, management and dissemination. The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) program was launched to meet this challenge.
Interoperability and standards are heavily emphasized in caBIG. Software development, adoption, and training work is performed under contract funding vehicles, not grants, in order to better enforce the incorporation of standards into caBIG systems. All software and data resources developed with caBIG funding are required to be made available under open source and open access licensing models that permit both academic and commercial use.
The caBIG program includes a large federation of participants from cancer centers, government agencies, and patient advocate groups that define and build interoperable, reusable systems for cancer research information. A number of organizations and government agencies are contributing voluntarily. The NCI Center for Bioinformatics provides operational oversight and management, and a general contractor handles day to day operations and coordination of program activities. Staff from the NCI Center for Bioinformatics also participate as a developers, adopters and trainers in various caBIG projects.
Participants are organized into workspaces that tackle the various dimensions of the program. Two cross-cutting workspaces - one for Architecture the other for Vocabularies and Common Data Elements - govern syntactic and semantic interoperability requirements. These cross-cutting workspaces provide best practices guidance for technology developers as well as conducting reviews of system designs and data standards. Four domain workspaces build and test applications for Clinical Trials, Integrative Cancer Research, Imaging, and Tissue Banks and Pathology Tools, representing the highest priority areas defined by the caBIG program members themselves. Strategic-level workspaces govern caBIG requirements for Training, Data Sharing and Intellectual Capital, and overall strategic planning.
In its first year caBIG defined high-level interoperability and compatibility requirements for information models, common data elements, vocabularies, and programming interfaces. These categories were grouped into different degrees of stringency, labeled as caBIG Bronze, Silver and Gold levels of compatibility. The Silver level is quite stringent, and demands that systems adopt and implement standards for model-driven architecture, metadata registration, controlled terminology, and application programming interfaces. The Gold level architecture consists of a formal data and analysis grid dubbed "caGrid" that all future caBIG systems will register with and plug into. caGrid is based upon the Globus Toolkit and a number of additional technologies such as caCORE from the NCI and Mobius from Ohio State University. More information is available at http://cabig.nci.nih.gov.
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