Semantic Infrastructure 2.0 needs to address metadata and terminology related requirements from the life sciences domain, enabling interoperability both between different sub-domains within life sciences, and between life sciences and other domains in caBIG® such as clinical trials and electronic health records. While life sciences will leverage common semantic functionalities such as ECCF registry, modeling, forms, behavioral semantics, terminology and value sets, there are aspects specific to the domain that need to be addressed, including but not limited to:
- High change semantic environment where novel concepts which have not been previously characterized need to be described
- Computational or analytical workflow compositions processing raw data to derive knowledge
- Description of statistical processes related to computational processses to achieve the above
- Working with the platform, enabling semantic description of raw data potentially of large volume (e.g. next-gen sequencing, imaging data)
- Support of provenance to trace data ownership and also to achieve reproducibility of analytical results
As a starting point, the requirements gathering effort will be informed by past and current related efforts in caBIG®, such as the recent Semantic Infrastructure Requirements Elicitation effort, the caBIO ECCF service specification project on molecular and pathway annotation services from the Integrated Cancer Research (ICR) Workspace, the Annotated Information Model (AIM) from the In-Vivo Imaging (IMAG) Workspace for both radiological and pathologic images, and work on "Dynamic Extensions" from the Tissue Banks and Pathology Tools (TBPT) Workspace. Nevertheless, we anticipate significant further input from community feedback based on this roadmap document, and from the life sciences workgroup within the Semantic Infrastructure 2.0 Inception Effort which will involve both requirements gathering and prototype tool building.
