Purpose: This is a proposal to support the work of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in its efforts to leverage the semantics found in healthcare databases (semantics specified in metadata) and the semantics found in vocabularies (terminologies, concepts systems) to benefit research, programs, and practice in the area of health and environment.
This proposed effort is to support the work of the NCI Vocabularies and Common Data Elements (VCDE) Workspace. The work is to advance metadata and vocabulary management capabilities through development of UML, XML, and OWL specifications, which help to assure that the finalized versions of specific international standards, meet NCI requirements and can be utilized by NCI in a standards based approaches for the VCDE Workspace.
The VDCE Workspace is responsible for evaluating and integrating systems for vocabulary and ontology content development, as well as software systems for content delivery. Workspace participants are also responsible for developing standards for the representation of ontologies and vocabularies used throughout the caBIG system. As a Cross Cutting Workspace, it interacts with many of the other Workspaces as part of their activities. The results of the proposed effort are to assure that VDCE (and broader NCI) requirements are addressed by relevant international standards, particularly ISO/IEC 11179 Edition 3. The work involves development of specifications in the form of a UML model plus text, ontology and an XML schema.
This proposal is to support NCI programs as well as a broad range of stakeholders in cancer research, and cancer-related medical practice. The project is to assure that NCI needs are reflected in the proposed specifications. This proposes an interagency agreement between the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Department of Energy (DOE) for work to be performed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). |