The section will provide an assessment of the gap between the roadmap and existing tools and platform.
Existing NCI Semantic Infrastructure
The NCI semantic infrastructure currently consists of a suite of tools aimed at terminological curation of models submitted as UML XMI files for semi-automated annotation, terminology services for concept lookup and codesystem browsing, and basic terminology and ontological relationships in the NCI Thesaurus and Metathesuarus. This bundle of infrastructure applications are termed caCORE (Cancer Common Ontologic Representation Environment).
caCORE tools and APIs are developed by the National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT) to provide the building blocks for development of interoperable information management systems. This suite of tools has helped to enable interoperability and data sharing from the scientific bench to the clinical bedside and back in the current SI.
caCORE includes the following key components:
- EVS (Enterprise Vocabulary Services) for hosting and managing vocabulary.
- caDSR (Cancer Data Standards Registry and Repository) for hosting and managing metadata.
- caCORE SDK, the GUI-based caCORE Workbench, and associated tools for model-driven software engineering of systems which can be easily integrated with caGrid.
EVS and the caDSR database and tools are the current basis of the semantic foundation for interoperable data and analytical services at NCI. caDSR is based on the ISO 11179 Part 3 metadata standard.
Developers use caCORE components to create "caCORE-like" systems. By definition these systems have object-oriented information models registered in caDSR whose meaning is linked to EVS vocabularies, and have open, public APIs and web services to provide access to the data. The caBIO data service is an example of a caCORE-like system developed using caCORE components.
Using caCORE tools, developers adapt and build applications that are caBIG® compatible, that is, interoperable with other caBIG® tools.
caCore tools include the following:
- caDSR APIs Download
- CDE Browser; DTDs
- Form Builder
- CDE Curation Tool
- caDSR Administration Tool
- UML Model Browser
- Semantic Integration Workbench
- caDSR Sentinel Tool
- NCIThesaurus
- NCIMetathesaurus
Additionally the caCore includes the caCore workbench.
The caCORE Workbench is a tool with a graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate the creation of a caBIG® silver or gold compliant system. The caCORE Workbench acts as a process guide and an integrated platform, enabling the user to more readily create a Data or Analytical service on the Grid. The following caBIG® process workflows are supported:
- Creation of a UML Model (ArgoUML, Enterprise Architect)
- Semantic integration (SIW, CDE Browser, UML Model Browser, Curation Tool)
- Model mapping (caAdapter)
- Application creation and deployment (SDK)
- Creation of a grid service (Introduce)
Proposed Features in the SIV2 Roadmap
The proposed SIV2 is meant to provide a means of fully supporting the existing NCI Semantic Infrastructure while providing a means of ongoing transformation of the existing artifacts and creation of equivalent tooling to support all current functionality of the SI.
The SIV2 extends the current functionality of the Semantic Infrastructure by adding the following functionality:
- A new means of assessing conformance of artifacts and applications
- A semantically linked artifact repository
- A metadata repository that links to the artifact repository
- A cross artifacts editing dashboard
- A rules engine for operatiing on the artifact repository and metadata repository
- A reasoning platform that executes inferencing and links to rule engines
- Introduction of additional semantic modeling standards (ISO 21090, HL7 RIM)
- An artifact governance platform
- Mutiple model transformation tools and APIs
- Tools for authoring standards compliant artifacts including schemas, models, and terminology value sets
