Major Goal

The major goal of the NCI CBIIT Semantics and Operations Group is to enable semantic interoperability in a virtual network or cloud of interconnected organizations, which in turn redefines how research is conducted, care is provided, and how patients and 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.

Due to the fundamental differences of the research and clinical domains they may employ different architectural models (compositional versus derivative for example). The semantic model and infrastructure must support each domain, uniting them semantically. The objectives noted below stem from the desired outcomes of the stakeholders in the NCI, CBIIT and the caBIG® program, both nationally and internationally.

Objectives

The objectives of the initiative are to identify and evaluate alternative approaches to establish and use semantics, to formally model promising approaches, and to develop reference implementations and operational resources and services to support semantic and syntactic interoperability in biomedical research and healthcare IT systems and information services.

Scientific Goals

The scientific goals of the initiative are to:

Programmatic Goals

The programmatic objectives of the initiative are to: