Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The Index Service provides a listing of available services, including representa-
tions of the information contained in that system, as well as status updates on
that system. The Global Model Exchange (GME) supports the index service
by providing access to the XML schemas of the services described in the index.
The caDSR and vocabulary or EVS services provide access to CDEs and
terminology that are used to code information in caGrid connected informa-
tion systems as well as describe those systems themselves. Security services
provide the necessary capabilities to support federated authentication and
authorization as well as establish the chain of trust necessary to support col-
laboration among the cancer research community. The details of the caGrid
security framework will be described in more detail in a later section. Finally,
there are the client applications that most users will interact with to access
information or resources on the grid. It is important to note that caGrid is a
specialized set of services based on open standards running across the com-
modity internet; it is not a dedicated network.
In addition to the underlying technology, caBIG has created a series of
applications that meet these caBIG interoperability requirements. All caBIG
applications have several common characteristics. First, they provide mecha-
nisms for an external entity to access the data or resources of the system,
including at least one native, object-oriented API (generally Java for caBIG
funded projects) that is used to support a Globus-based grid service (WSRF)
and a WS-I-compliant Web service. REST* and other APIs as well as user
interfaces are often available as well. Second, a formal information model [in
the Unifi ed Modeling Language (UML)] of the interface is provided to enable
easier use and integration. Finally (and perhaps most importantly) the infor-
mation model (and hence the interface) is fully described by a set of CDEs
defi ned by the caDSR extended ISO 11179 metamodel, providing the seman-
tics that are required to understand the information that is contained within
the system. As described earlier, all of these applications are released under a
nonviral open-source license, available for both commercial and noncommer-
cial use as well as open- or closed-source derivative works. These applications
have been deployed at a number of sites across the United States and beyond
(see later); in addition, the NCI usually provides a hosted instance for use by
community members that do not have the resources or the desire to maintain
their own servers.
In order to facilitate adoption and use, caBIG has created two sets of appli-
cation bundles, the Life Sciences Distribution (LSD) and the caBIG Clinical
Trials Suite (CCTS), to support the needs of large communities. The LSD [17]
is composed of eight applications [16] that support basic biomedical research:
1. caArray
Microarray repository [18] .
2. caTissue
Biospecimen management system [19] .
* REST (short for representational state transfer) is a lightweight interface protocol based on the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used by Web browsers.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search