The section will provide an assessment of the gap between the roadmap and existing tools and platform.

 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.

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.