This is the NCI home page for Semantic Infrastructure and Operations Group.

The caBIG® Vocabulary Knowledge Center Semantic Infrastructure Main page contains links to the project plans, schedules, reqruiements, use cases and other architectural documents. 

The Semantic Infrastructure team supports the vision of the caBIG® infrastructure, which is to:

• Connect the cancer and broader medical and research community through shareable, interoperable "network of networks".
• Support the business/transaction/message based dynamic semantics that will underlie the emerging information infrastructure supporting healthcare delivery
• Deploy and extend standards and a common syntax and semantics to more easily share information.
• Build and adapt tools for collecting, analyzing, integrating and disseminating information.
• Enable cancer centers and vendors to leverage this infrastructure to provide support of the broader community.

The Semantic Infrastructure and Operations Group composes the semantic aspects of the CORE Program Area, the caBIG® Vocabulary and Common Data Elements Workspace, and certain aspects of the caBIG® Architecture Workspace, and caGrid®.

The major goal of the Semantics and Operations Group is to enable semantic interoperability and integration in a virtual network or cloud of interconnected organizations, in order to redefine how research is conducted, care is provided, and patients/participants interact with the biomedical research and care enterprise. The research community is primarily focused on the development of new knowledge and treatments, while the health care community is focused on clinical care and outcomes; both objectives can be advanced by leveraging the semantic infrastructure investment in CBIIT and caBIG® tools and frameworks.

The scientific goals of the initiative are to:

• Improve practical utility of semantics to support translational research and personalized medicine

The programmatic objectives of the initiative are to:

• Develop implementation independent architecture model(s) which define the semantics backbone components and behavior
• Develop reference implementations that the community can review and adopt or adapt as appropriate.
• Utilize/ comply with relevant standards as possible and appropriate

The activities of the NCI CBIIT Semantics and Operations Group fall into three areas:

• Content Management - the processes and procedures that ensure the breadth and quality of the metadata and terminology used to record the semantics of data meet the needs of the caBIG® community.
• Semantics Infrastructure - design and development of software resources and operations including producing reference implementations of platform independent models
• Semantics Architecture and Management - defining the platform independent (as also called "implementation Independent") specification for systems and processes required to meet the semantics needs of the CBIIT/caBIG enterprise, and for assuring that operational requirements for semantics support are met in a timely and reliable way.
  

Current thinking is that the new infrastructure architecture will include: 

• Service oriented architecture
• 11179 Ed3 compliant federated metadata repository
• Model repository
• CTS2 compliant terminology server/services
• Rules repository and related tools to support behavioral semantics and knowledge discovery. 
  

Updates to this page will be made at regular intervals as the details of the infrastructure architecture emerge in more detail.