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The National Cancer Institute has long been a leader in terminology related services and has provided the cancer community with structured terminology through the NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services for several years. There is now a much wider range of terminology use cases for the needs from bedside to bench and back and Semantic Infrastructure 2.0 is being designed to address all of these use cases. The use cases require thinking beyond the capabilities of the existing metadata repository as demonstrated in the Cancer Data Standards Registry and Repository (caDSR) and supporting semantic representations of concepts as they are used in clinical information exchange using the HL7 structured documents. Requirements are also recognized for binding concepts to information models in the abstract as domain values, for use in models such as the BRIDG (Biomedical Research Integrated Domain Group) domain analysis model (DAM) or the life sciences DAM.

As NCI supports these new information models, a fundamental requirement is recognized to continue to support customers who have invested in the common data element capabilities of NCI over the last several years and to provide for customers to continue to use those elements while making the transition to Semantic Infrastructure 2.0. The NCI also needs to continue to support the needs of new customers who are creating information and services that use terminology and structures that exist outside of the HL7 BRIDG and LS DAM space. The result will be a more robust representation that captures semantics consistent with usage in clinical care and clinical research, and semantics that will provide more nearly full coverage for the life sciences research community.

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A user has identified one or more sets of permissible values that need to be mapped to standard codes used by the Vocabulary and Common Data Elements workspace. These values need to be assembled in a format such as Excel, XML or simple tab separated values and then be uploaded to a service that will allow them to be mapped to the codes that are endorsed for interchange on the grid. The user must be able to locate existing value sets and to construct new ones where appropriate targets do not exist. The user needs to be able to instruct the service to do automatic first approximation at a mapping, and then needs to be able to search, refine and validate mapping, and to be able to record a "quality" metric that states how closely the mapping actually approximates the intent of the original value. The user may encounter potential problems and omissions during this process and will need to submit suggested changes and enhancements to the appropriate oversight body for potential enhancement. Once the mappings are created, the user needs to be able to download the resulting mappings in an electronic format such as Excel or XML, as well as be able to submit the mappings to a service, either local or centralized, that will represent the mappings via a standardized API.

7 - NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services

The NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services have developed a rich community and have documented use cases and requirements. These use cases and requirements are here.