Architecture (ARCH) Newcomer Information

Mission And Goals

This Cross Cutting Workspace is developing policy documents, reviewing Workspaces, working on architectural standards and provide architectural assistance as necessary to the other Workspaces. The primary purpose of the Architectural Crosscutting Workspace is to ensure consistent application of the caBIG™ development principles to the distributed groups doing the actual integration and implementation activities throughout the caBIG™ project.

The materials below provide an overview of the workspace:

• caBIG™ Compatibility: Cross-Cutting Workspaces  (from the Newcomers Session at the Annual Meeting in February 2007)
• caGrid: Here's the "G" in caBIG™   (from the Newcomers Session at the Annual Meeting in February 2007)

You can see who is involved in this workspace on the list of  ARCH Participating Organizations

How It Operates

This workspace welcomes participation in the workspace and SIG activities from individuals interested in the workspace mission and goals. Participant activities include attending regular teleconferences and periodic face-to-face meetings, commenting on products under development or review and conducting more in-depth work in pursuit of workspace objectives. Anyone with an interest in the activities of this workspace is welcome to attend teleconferences and sign up for the listserv.

If you are interested in learning more you can join the next teleconference by emailing the workspace lead to get the toll free dial-in number and access code. The ARCH Contact Information section provides contact information for both the workspace lead.

Teleconferences: Workspace participants meet regularly via teleconference to discuss issues and devise solutions. The Architecture WS meetings are held on first and third Wednesdays of each month and listed on the Schedule. To see what the D&T WS has been working on recently, you can review the Meeting Notes from past teleconferences.

Listservs: Between teleconferences the NIH ARCH Listserv is the primary means of collaboration for participants. Discussions, teleconference agendas and dial-in information as well as cancellations are sent out on the listserv on the so signing up is a good way to keep up-to-date.

What have they done (products)

Compatibility and Certification

• caBIG™ Compatibility Guidelines   [v2  7/7/2005]  The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines on caBIG™ compatibility to caBIG™ participants and interested stakeholders. This document provides a set of definitions that caBIG™ participants can use to evaluate the maturity level of potential caBIG™ systems and applications. This is a living document that will evolve to keep in line with the emerging standards and requirements for interoperability that are being defined by the caBIG™ community. This is the current version.
• Silver Compatibility Review  The majority of developer projects in caBIG™ are developing to Silver level compatibility. This section describes the review process for caBIG™-funded developer projects and lists the status of products (passed review, under review).
  
• Bronze Compatibility Certification Program   The caBIG™ Bronze certification program is a mechanism for software products not created as part of the caBIG™ program to be certified as compliant with the caBIG™ compatibility guidelines at the Bronze level. This section describes the certification process and lists the status of products (passed review, under review).
  

Infrastructure

• caGrid 1.0
  The goal of cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid caBIG™ is to develop applications and the underlying systems architecture that connects together data, tools, scientists and organizations in an open federated environment. In meeting this goal, caBIG will necessarily bring together data from many and diverse data sources. The underlying service oriented infrastructure for caBIG is caGrid. The first public version (0.5) of caGrid was released on September 9, 2005. caGrid 1.0 culminates the development of the federated infrastructure and will more fully support the needs of the cancer research community.
  
  caGrid defines two types of “grid services” that can be registered as nodes on the grid: Data Services and Analytical Services. caGrid provides a standard infrastructure for bioinformaticians to advertise their services thru common metadata defined in Unified Modeling Language (UML) domain information model. Users can access these grid services and data programmatically using locally managed access control policies and using strongly typed data objects in XML format. caGrid infrastructure also provides strong semantic specification thru binding to description logic terminology concepts that can be used by users to discover new and interesting scientific information using semantically aware searches.

Policies, Guidelines and Whitepapers

• caGrid 0.5 (Prototype) Technology Evaluation   A white paper documenting the evaluation of caGrid, a system created to facilitate data and system integration across the caBIG™ network. Development of the system was based on The Globus Tool Kit and the Open Grid Services Architecture-Data Access Integration (OGSA-DAI).  [07/23/2004]
• Common Query Language   A white paper evaluating query languages that can be leveraged and standardized across all the data grid services within caBIG™.   [March 2005]
• MVR Missing Value Reason   A white paper with recommendations of how caBIG™ developers can classify and describe the metadata for data fields that are missing values.   [draft  7/13/2005]
• Workflow Language Recommendations   A white paper evaluating various workflow language technologies. The document presents findings and a recommendation for a caBIG™-wide Workflow Language.   [v1.1  1/12/2005]
• caBIG™ Security Technology Evaluation White Paper   A comprehensive review of open source security tools, technologies and standards that could be potentially leveraged by caBIG.  [1/23/2006]