EVS 3.x Retirement
About the EVS Wiki
This is the wiki home page for the EVS products. EVS developers may edit this page and any user may add a comment. The child pages have technical and product information for EVS.
NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS) provides controlled vocabulary that is the semantic base for caCORE, CORE infrastructure, and caBIG® tools and collaborations. EVS activities include terminology development, terminology licensing, software development and licensing, and operations support. Projects center on development and maintenance of vocabulary and servers.
Vocabulary Projects
EVS develops and provides operations support for two broadly used vocabulary sources for cancer research: the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt), a cancer-focused terminology, and the NCI Metathesaurus (Meta), a mapping of concepts to terms in multiple vocabularies.
EVS also conducts the Biomedical Grid Terminology (BiomedGT) project to enlist participation in developing an open, federated ontology for translational research. EVS has developed tools to support collaborative community-based ontology development, and is actively seeking subject matter experts from across biomedicine as contributors to BiomedGT.
In addition, EVS licenses and serves third party terminology as needed to meet NCI and caBIG® requirements and creates and improves tools for vocabulary development, curation and deployment. From its beginning, EVS has sought to address the broad spectrum of terminology needs at NCI.
Vocabulary Servers and APIs
Architecturally the EVS terminology service is a component of caCORE. The LexEVS 4.2 service is the current release, and LexEVS 5.0 is under development. With that release, the caCORE 3.x APIs and EVS 3.x Grid services will be retired. Refer to the retirement announcement for details.
The EVS/caCORE 4.x service supports the new distributed LexBIG API as well as the older caCORE 3.2 EVS API. Both are supported by the LexBIG server. Because adoption of the LexBIG terminology server is a major change for EVS users, NCI CBIIT is continuing to operate the original caCORE 3.2 server as well as the newer EVS/caCORE 4.x server. For both, the caCORE client side APIs provide an open, publicly available, unified interface to EVS services. Effective with caCORE 4.1, EVS surfaced a terminology service node based on the caCORE 3.2 EVS API on caGrid 1.1.
The underlying software code, object model, use cases, and user documentation are available for use under an open-source license. Developers are encouraged visit the EVS download page for the relevant files and licensing information.
The following Enterprise Architect example files are available.