Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
community experience through which they can share data, ser-
vices, workflows, and the knowledge obtained by doing experi-
ments. We will further discuss this issue in Chapter 8.
Projects that embrace the idea of SOS and adopt a Web service-
based infrastructure include myGrid [164,165], caBIG/caGrid [166],
CardioVascular Research Grid (CVRG) [167], and BIRN [168]. In the
next subsection, we use caGrid as a case study of SOS.
7.1.2 Case Study: The Cancer Grid (caGrid)
The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) program [169]
sponsored by the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) is an open-source,
open-access information network enabling the cancer community to
share data and knowledge, and eventually accelerating the discovery of
new cancer treatment methods. Initiated in 2004, caBIG as of 2011 had
more than 2,300 program participants from over 700 institutions. Its
tool inventory includes over 40 software tools in the areas such as
clinical trials, biospecimens, imaging, infrastructure, and vocabularies.
Its tools and technologies are used or evaluated by 15 countries [170].
caGrid is the underlying service-oriented infrastructure of caBIG,
and is built on the Globus Toolkit Grid middleware. caGrid mainly
consists of the core infrastructure, the services created and managed
by this infrastructure, and the research community hosting and using
these services.
caGrid core infrastructure
uses Globus Toolkit version 4 as the
service-based middleware, and adopts Web Services Resource Frame-
work (WSRF) [161]. WSRF is an extension to the Web service standard
stack by addressing the specific concerns of Grid services such as
stateful services, state management, and resource lifecycle manage-
ment. Using WSRF, the carefully designed core infrastructure contains
components such as metadata, service discovery and index, security,
and an integrated development environment (IDE) to design a Web
service with these enhanced, caGrid specific features, for example,
metadata, index, and security.
caGrid services
, created and managed by the core infrastructure, are
virtualized access points of data and analytical resources related to
cancer detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. They can be
classified into two categories: data resources that are exposed as
data
