Semantic Infrastructure (SI) MDR Evolution
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) is seeking broad input and feedback from sources of expertise and interest in semantic metadata management services.
The cornerstone of these services is the Cancer Data Standards Registry (caDSR), a repository with data element descriptions and form designs, with semantics linked to NCI’s controlled terminology. The caDSR offers services to the cancer research community to create, access, maintain, and use these descriptions across application systems, files, and databases. CBIIT wants to understand how to make the NCI common data elements more useful, more accessible, easier to integrate into research and care processes and systems, and better support community comment and community curation of these elements, linked semantics, and metadata. CBIIT plans to rebuild and modernize these services, while continuing to support and evolve existing content and customers. We want to make it easier to discover the consensus standards and to integrate these elements and linked data into cancer research and care workflows. The intent is to align NCI’s infrastructure with emerging NIH, national, and international metadata initiatives.
To this end we have issued an RFI (NOT-CA-15-019), that can be found on the NIH Grants page, and have wrapped up development of a requirements document, which can be found here. Our goal in the requirements document is to describe the core services that are needed, and to identify the new emerging areas of metadata that we may need to support or integrate with in the future.
