caDSR Wiki

Metadata Needs and Support

The caDSR (Cancer Data Standards Registry and Repository) supports a broad community of users both inside and outside of NCI that have requirements to ensure the longevity and aggregability of biomedical research data.  Participants have included NCI and its partners in academic institutions (including NCI Designated Cancer Centers, SPOREs and Cooperative Groups), other NIH institutes (including NICHD, NHLBI and NIDCR), other federal agencies (in particular the FDA), pharmaceutical companies, standards development organizations (e.g. CDISC) and a range of international biomedical organizations. For more information see the caDSR Collaborations and Use.

Requirements from researchers and/or their supporting informatics groups drive the creation of metadata in the caDSR, and not vice versa. Metadata content development usually starts with a request for assistance by a researcher planning a clinical or research data collection. Metadata curators work with the user and EVS to identify an appropriate vocabulary while identifying a mix of new and existing CDE content to support the scientific requirement. Curators always attempt to reuse existing metadata (where that content supports the scientific requirement) as a way to help scientists ensure the compatibility of their data with other data collected across the enterprise.

The word cloud that follows illustrates the broad variety of collections of data elements that are reposited in the caDSR for various communities and types of studies. 

About caDSR

CBIIT’s management of metadata began as part of an effort to support CTEP’s reporting for breast cancer trials, and from a need to develop and disseminate standards that would ensure consistency and accuracy in reporting across the Cooperative Groups. This led to the establishment of a centralized resource and associated web-based tools for clearly documenting and sharing human- and machine-readable data descriptions. The need to maintain and share data about data, or metadata, became the basis for the NCI’s repository of CDEs, metadata and data standards, what is now known as the caDSR. A CDE Steering Committee was formed to define what kind of metadata was needed for the repository. Driven by the needs from community to create, share, and manage CDEs, a set of metadata attributes was established, which included name, definition, valid values, and workflow status. Consultation with appropriate experts identified ISO 11179, an international standard for data-element registries, as meeting the needs identified by the CDE Steering committee. As time went on, more groups wanted to record their data elements and share them via the caDSR, so additional features were added, including extensions of ISO 11179 to enable storage templates for CRFs that use CDEs.

As more groups recorded their data elements in caDSR, the difficulty in creating high-quality names and definitions for data elements became recognized as a challenge for data-element curators, as well as a best practice for clarifying the meaning of the data.  Consequently, ISO 11179-5 Naming Principles were used to establish naming conventions that could be applied across groups. The same naming conventions are used in the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). Since NCI had the EVS terminology services available, this was seen as a reasonable means by which to aid this task by giving curators access to well-formed and NCI-preferred names for concepts. At present, curators find concepts in EVS based on synonym searches, and the preferred-term name and definition streamline their task.  The challenge of ensuring that duplicate CDEs were not created led to leveraging the parts of the ISO 11179 metamodel along with a preference for the use of NCIt concepts. NCIt is a specialized cancer terminology that includes additional knowledge from the literature about these concepts and is modeled as an OWL ontology with relationships to other concepts. Therefore, a link to NCIt concepts from caDSR concepts can help test similarity between CDEs.  It can also provide access to researchers for exploring the meaning of a given CDE in greater depth.

Although this activity began as a means to support the cooperative groups, the caDSR now supports a much wider audience. This includes clinical trials run by the NCI intramural program, the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) and Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP); Specialized programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs), Cancer Centers and other academic medical centers, other NIH institutes and centers as well as standards groups such as CDISC and a variety of international partners.

A note on the term “Common Data Element”. While originally intended to mean a data element that was reused, the term has come to mean any description of a variable and its valid values. In this document, we will use the standard NCI version of this definition, which is to say a variable description (including valid values) described in the caDSR using its implementation of the ISO 11179 variable, regardless of whether the element in question has been used more than once.

About the caDSR Wiki

This is the wiki home page for caDSR. You may edit pages if you are working on them with the authors. You are welcome to leave comments. This wiki includes the following.

• caDSR Content
  Focuses on the Metadata Content within the caDSR and is most useful for consumers. The pages include Data Standards, Harmonization, Reuse and Business Rules that establish the capabilities of the caDSR Tools.

• caDSR Database and Tools
  Focuses on the features of the Tools from the perspective of users. The pages include descriptions for each tool, Release Notes and reference materials. The information on these pages is specific to the use case implementation of Business Rules recorded in the caDSR Content pages.

• caDSR for Application Developers
  Focuses on the software interfaces to the caDSR available to programmers and software developers. The pages include details on the caDSR API, XML messages produced and consumed by the caDSR products and the caDSR UML Model.

• caDSR Installation and Implementation
  Focuses on Open Source adoption of the caDSR Database and Tools. The pages include ISO 11179 implementation extensions, software implementation architectures and Downloads.

• caDSR Projects
  Focuses on specific projects. The pages include projects spanning across tools and products and projects involving inter-metadata registry sharing. For projects related to one specific tool, refer to the caDSR Database and Tools section.

Documentation and FAQs

• Index Page - Release Notes for caCORE, caDSR, and EVS
• caDSR 4.x Technical Guide
• Semantic Integration Workbench and UML Model Loader 4.1 User Guide PDF
• caBIG® Compatibility Guidelines
• Index Page - FAQs for caDSR, EVS, and caCORE
• Javadocs Index

Email Lists and Forums

NEW How to Cite caDSR

To cite the NCI Semantic Infrastructure, use the following reference.

Komatsoulis, G.A., Warzel, D.B., Hartel, F.W., Shanbhag, K, Chilukuri, R, Fragoso, G., de Coronado, S, Reeves, D.M., Hadfield, J.B., Ludet, C., and P.A. Covitz (2007) "caCORE version 3: Implementation of a model driven, service-oriented architecture for semantic interoperability." Journal of Biomed Informatics. 2008 February; 41(1): 106--123. Published online 2007 April 2. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2007.03.009.

To cite the caDSR Form Builder general software, use the following reference.

NCI caDSR Form Builder. <https://formbuilder.nci.nih.gov/FormBuilder/formSearchAction.do> National Cancer Institute, Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, 01 Oct. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2013.

To cite a specific collection of forms in caDSR, use a reference like the following.

"[Protocol or Classification Scheme Name]." [Context name], [Node name], NCI caDSR Form Builder. <https://formbuilder.nci.nih.gov> National Cancer Institute, Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, 01 Oct. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2013

Example: " CALGB: 10603 Treatment Form ." CTEP, Protocol Forms, NCI caDSR Form Builder. <https://formbuilder.nci.nih.gov> National Cancer Institute, Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, 01 Oct. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2013

To cite caDSR CDE Browser software, use a reference like the following.

NCI caDSR CDE Browser. <https://cdebrowser.nci.nih.gov> National Cancer Institute, Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, 01 Oct. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2013.

To cite caDSR CDEs in a particular collection or group, use a reference like the following.

"[Classification Scheme Name]." [Context name], [Node name], NCI caDSR CDE Browser. <https://cdebrowser.nci.nih.gov> National Cancer Institute, Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, 01 Oct. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2013.

Example: "NAACCR 11.1." PS & CC (NCI Population Sciences & Cancer Control), Classifications, Division of Population Cancer Control and Population Sciences, NCI caDSR CDE Browser. <https://cdebrowser.nci.nih.gov> National Cancer Institute, Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, 01 Oct. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2013