Call for Comment: NCI Thesaurus accepted by VCDE WS as a Vocabulary Standard for caBIG™

The VCDE WS has evaluated the NCI Thesaurus as a candidate vocabulary standard for caBIG™. The VCDE WS voted unanimously to accept the NCI Thesaurus as a Vocabulary Standard for caBIG™.

The VCDE WS asks the caBIG™ community to comment on this proposed Vocabulary Standard within 30 days of this notification (by June 21st). Your comments will be important in the final decision on the proposed standard. Please send all comments or questions to Brian Davis at: bdavis@3rdmill.com by June 21, 2007.

The NCI Thesaurus can be browsed at:
http://nciterms.nci.nih.gov/NCIBrowser/Dictionary.do

The VCDE WS evaluation of NCI Thesaurus, including a powerpoint presentation and the criteria by which NCI Thesaurus was evaluated can be found at the following GForge site:
https://gforge.nci.nih.gov/frs/?group_id=237

The uses of Vocabulary standards are addresses in the caBIG Compatibility Guidelines (see https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/guidelines_documentation/caBIGCompatGuideRev2_final.pdf).

The advantages of designating caBIG™ vocabulary Standards include, but are not limited to:

• caBIG™-wide, re-use of the same standard vocabularies will increase interoperability
• developers will be encouraged to use Standard Vocabularies for concepts and value domains
• usage of standard vocabularies will ease compatibility reviews