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Introduction

The NCI-supported caBIG program is facing a major expansion of its mission and of the community of stakeholders that it must engage. The success of the program to date has been widely recognized by numerous thought leaders, technology innovators, and program managers in the fields of biomedical computing and health information technology.  These leaders have been influenced by both the technological sophistication and the open community processes of the caBIG program, and are seeking to adapt caBIG to meet the much broader agenda of health care information management, sharing, and integration across institutions, communities of practice, and patients.

As a means towards engaging this larger community and contributing to the creation of solutions for its needs, the BIG Health Consortium was formed, a non-governmental organization that is affiliated with caBIG, but which has a complementary agenda that is focused on enabling the integration of research, care delivery, and patient-driven decision making in practical ways.  As a consequence, the institutional stakeholders associated with BIG Health Consortium extend well beyond the cancer centers, universities, and cooperative groups that make up the core NCI-funded constituencies that have participated in caBIG since its original incarnation.  The extended community thus goes beyond what is considered caBIG-proper today, and includes groups that are not yet connected to caGrid.

Background

The primary goal for this Architecture, Development, and Deployment of a Knowledge Repository and Service is to address the needs of this extended community for a scalable, decentralized infrastructure for managing and disseminating operational metadata and information models, and their associated semantic constructs.  The vision for the project is to re-imagine the caBIG technology environment as a more open and more readily extensible framework, one that can grow with less dependency on the centralized processes and systems that are manifest in the first generation of caBIG technology.  In particular, the role of the central metadata registry, the caDSR, must be redefined as a federation of metadata registries that can be instantiated and plugged into the caBIG grid or an extended community "cloud" by any qualified entity. 

The caDSR has a suite of tools and APIs that support workflows for metadata development, browsing and retrieval.  In addition, the caDSR has been adapted to support the UML model-driven development paradigm adopted by caBIG.  UML-defined information models such as those from the BRIDG project, caArray, caTissue, and others are each registered in the caDSR through conversion of the model elements into ISO11179 metadata constructs.  This functionality, and the workflows that it supports, has evolved over an 8-year period and is now quite mature.  It satisfies the current requirements for semantic representation in the current caBIG developer and user community, but it is ill-suited to serve the new requirements for decentralization and indefinite scalability in the broader health care community. The goal of this program is therefore to harvest and recycle the best elements of the first generation of caBIG metadata infrastructure, and to then incorporate those elements into a redesigned and modernized technology stack that is engineered from the start to support a federated deployment topology with far less centralized administration.

Scope

This program calls for the design and implementation of a metadata registry and model repository that can be instantiated in multiple physical locations in a federated manner, and which supports the caBIG and BIG Health community needs for operational semantic metadata management and integration.  The program must provide a number of capabilities and services:

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Background

Scope

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Users and Characteristics

Related Documentation

Resources

The following is a list of documents that provide background material, requirements, and related topics:

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