Overview
The Knowledge Repository (KR) project will produce software components (tooling and services) that are part of the caBIG Semantic Infrastructure version 2 (SI v2). The role of KR components will be to address the (recently) expanded NCI stakeholder community's needs for defining and sharing static semantics. The Cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR) has, since the inception of the caBIG program, been responsible for addressing static semantic needs. The KR project will therefore, subsume the responsibilities of the caDSR and address the additional needs of the expanded stakeholder community.
The scale of caBIG's mission has expanded in both size (from national to international) and scope (including BIG Health, beyond NCI cancer centers). In order to address the expanded size of the community, the architecture of KR service components will support collaboration and sharing of metadata among distributed, federated repositories through a set of service interfaces that are specified according to the Services-Aware Interoperability Framework (SAIF). In order to address the expanded scope of caBIG's mission, these services will support expression of additional contextual semantics by focusing on high-level information models, such as Domain Analysis Models (DAMs), for example BRIDG. This additional context supports the capturing of semantics that goes beyond what has been captured in caDSR to date.
Current Status
This project is currently (2010) working to defining the road map for transitioning from the current semantic infrastructure to the SI v2. The inputs to our work include the analysis of the Semantic Infrastructure Requirements Elicitation effort and the static semantic needs of projects/groups such as caEHR, CDISC SHARE, HL7 CIC, and others.
