February 23, 2011, 2-4 PM Eastern

Anton Nekrutenko and Daniel Blankenberg and of The Pennsylvania State University gave a presentation on Galaxy, an open-source next generation sequence (NGS) analysis software system. It addresses the need to empower the scientists without access to extensive infrastructure to do the analysis. Galaxy is a free web service, and has a plethora of analysis tools and has workflow generation capabilities
Stacey Harper gave a briefing on nano-TAB, a general purpose framework that provides a standard means to communicate nanomaterial data and metadata. The needs the data exchange format addresses and an overview of the file structure were discussed.

February 14, 2011, 2-4 PM Eastern

caArray Users Meeting featured upcoming plugin architecture for support the addition of new parsers and data storage mechanisms.

January 26, 2011, 2-4 PM Eastern

Jenny Kelley, NCI Population Sciences, updated the community on caLIMS v2 new features. She also provided a thorough demonstration of the tool.
The details on the upcoming release of caB2B in March were presented by Baris Suzek of Georgetown University. The tool will assist Bioinformaticians and Researchers discover and collect data on the Grid.
Nano WG and LS SME WG each presented an overview and current goals to the community.

January 12, 2011, 2-4 PM Eastern

The ICR Workspace is hearing reports on activities for the last period.
• Bob Freimuth discussed IRWG work on the LS DAM Updates and additions to the model will appear in the next release. Work on the portion of the model shared with HL7 Clinical Genomics Working Group is extending the generic assay core to include concepts for gene variation.
• Dennis Thomas reported on the processes to integrate the NanoParticle Ontology into the NCI Metathesaurus. This expands NPO accessibility and brings more semantics into the NCImt.

November 10, 2010, 2-4 PM Eastern

Ken Smith from the Molecular Analysis Tools Knowledge Center presented an update on geWorkbench, which is a platform for integrated genomics. A demo involving data from an ovarian cancer study highlighted features from the last two releases including BLAST tools, gene annotation, GO viewer, pathway visualization tools and more.

October 27, 2010, 2-4 PM Eastern

Ulli Wagner presented the website eMICE: electronic Models Information, Communication, and Education. It is a communication tool for the NCI Mouse Models of Human Cancers Consortium (MMHCC). Currently the program has a strong focus on education and the website was constructed to reach the broad spectrum of general audience to researcher. Mukesh Sharma reported in on the recent HL7 Meeting. He gave a review of Clinical Genomics working group activities in the three different tracks. He reported in on the discussion of the generic assay model which was developed as part of a caBIG ICR Information Representation Working Group collaboration with HLy Clinical Genomics Working Group.

October 12, 2010, 2-4 PM Eastern

Rashmi Srinivasa polled the workspace on interest in generic assay management. She provided an update on caArray which included features anticipating handling next generation sequencing data such as: the ability to handle fastq and BAM/SAM files, the ability to move and store large volumes of data. There were also security and technology stack related updated. Rashmi also presented Annotare which provides templates and tools to annotate MAGE-TAB experiments.
Raghu Chintalapati reviewed the SAIF and ECCF Implementation in NCI CBIIT. SAIF is comprised of frameworks to help provide working interoperability. There are four frameworks or grammars (information, behavior, governance, ECCF) and an implementation guide is being written to describe the CBIIT operationalization of SAIF. ECCF is a framework for service specifications and has five viewpoints represented (enterprise, information, computational, engineering and technology). A key component of specifications is modeling a service at different levels of abstraction: conceptual, platform independent, platform specific, implementation.

September 8, 2010, 2-4 PM Eastern

Karen Ketchum provided an overview of caIntegrator, a tool that provides the ability to develop web portal without software skills and allows you to import your data and query it. NCI hosts 5 studies in the caIntegrator platform. Newest features include enhancements to subject annotation interface, list management, upgraded connectivity to the NBIA, external links, expanded microarray platform support and copy number analysis capabilities. The call was closed out with ICR Working Group Reports (LS SMEs, Nano WG, IRWG).

August 25, 2010, 2-4 PM Eastern

Jenny Kelley presented the features and functionalities under development for caLIMS2. The purpose of the caLIMS2 project is to create a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) that is interoperable within established caBIG® standards and guidelines and will track a complete laboratory workflow that uses materials from a specimen management service (e.g. caTissue) to generate experimental results for one of the caBIG® data management services (e.g. caArray). Core LIMS functions include the management of personnel, equipment, lab supplies and reagents, samples, laboratory workflow and experimentally derived metadata and data. caLIMS2 will complete the caBIG® bench to bed model by bridging the gap between biospecimen repositories, data repositories and analysis tools. Stephen Goldstein provided the Workspace with a demo on JIRA which is the NCI CBIIT's new issue tracking and project management tool. External users can log into JIRA to create issues and feature requests for specific products. Product teams can use JIRA to manage their development cycles. Testing teams can use JIRA to manage their testing efforts. And the Program team can use JIRA to create reports around issue lifecycles and development progress.

August 11, 2010, 2-4 PM Eastern

Liz Hahn-Dantona of the EVS team demonstrated how to access and use the NCI term browser, NCI thesaurus and NCI Metathesaurus. She described content in various tabs and pointed out features of interest. In preparation for the caBIG® Annual Meeting, Dr. Robert Freimuth created a 508 compliant presentation. He offered many helpful hints and his lively demonstration showed just how easy it is to create compliant presentations using layouts and alt text. Rashmi Srinivasa gave an overview of caArray. The caArray users meeting is now held in the ICR WS calls. Current features and those being added in the next release features were highlighted, including support for next generation sequencing experiments files FASTQ and BAM.