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"Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS)"
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NCICB bases its data semantics on controlled terminology supplied by the
NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS) Project. The NCI EVS is a set of
services and resources that address NCI's needs for
controlled vocabulary. The EVS Project is a service of the Center
for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology.
NCI Enterprise Vocabulary Services
encompass terminology development, terminology licensing, software development
and licensing and operations support activities. From its inception, EVS has
sought to address the broad spectrum of terminology needs at NCI. EVS provides the
base upon which the data semantics of
caCORE and caBIG
initiatives depend.
The two NCI EVS production terminology products are: the
NCI Thesaurus (NCIt)
a cancer focused terminology, and the
NCI Metathesaurus
(Meta) a mapping between many terminologies. A major goal of NCIt and NCI Meta is
providing a comprehensive source of terminology needed by the caCORE components,other NCI activities
and caBIG. Also, EVS licenses and serves third party terminology as needed to meet NCI and caBIG requirements.
NCIt provides four features which, taken together, have proven sufficient to underpin
the semantic integration of the caCORE. The four are: permanent, non-semantic concept codes; NCI preferred terms for
each concept; English language definitions; and synonyms. A more complete description of the
semantics of NCIt is available. An Editorial Policy document briefly describing the policies
governing change to NCIt content is included with the semantics information.
EVS has recently begun a project to enlist the biomedical community to participate in development of an
open, federated ontology covering translational research.
The project
is called Biomedical Grid Terminology (BiomedGT).
EVS has developed infrastructure
to support collaborative community based ontology development, and is actively seeking
subject matter experts from across biomedicine as contributors to
BiomedGT.
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Please feel free to request EVS to add new features to our projects, by creating a feature request on the EVS Project GForge site. |
Architecturally the EVS terminology service is a component of caCORE. The EVS/caCORE 4.x service
supports the new distributed LexBIG API as well as the older caCORE 3.2 EVS API. Both are supported by the LexBIG server.
Because adoption of the LexBIG
terminology server is a major change for EVS users, we are continuing to operate the
original caCORE 3.2 server as well as the newer EVS/caCORE 4.x server. In either case, the caCORE client side APIs provide a open,
publicly available unified interface to EVS services. Effective with caCORE 4.1, EVS has surfaced a terminology service node
based on the caCORE 3.2 EVS API on caGrid 1.1.
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