1 Birds of a Feather Reports By Session Facilitators caBIG Architecture/VCDE F2F October 21, 2009

2 Birds of a Feather Sessions Agenda – Day 2, Wednesday October 21, :00 – 10:05 AM BIRDS OF A FEATHER SESSIONS (Industry Rooms 1, 2 and 3) Locations:Industry Room 1Industry Room 2Industry Room 3 8:00 – 9:00 AM BOF #1: Semantic Infrastructure Requirements Redux Facilitators: Sal Mungal, Bilal Elahi, Brian Davis, Frank Hartel, Denise Warzel BOF #2: Development of caBIG ® Comparative Effectiveness Research Enterprise Use Case Facilitators: Andrew Post, Joel Saltz, Sherri De Coronado, Javed Butler, Allan Kirk BOF #3: Alignment of Developer Applications to DAMs Facilitators: Lynne Wilkens, Bob Freimuth, Mukesh Sharma 9:05 – 10:05 AM BOF #4: Software Engineering and Metadata Standards to Support ECCF and Service Specification Facilitator: Denise Warzel BOF #5: caGrid Adoption and Adaption Facilitators: Stephen Langella, Justin Permar, Joel Saltz BOF #6: Harmonization of cgMDR Development Facilitators: Denis Avdic, Shannon Hastings, Steve Harris

3 BOF #1: Semantic Infrastructure Requirements Redux Lay semantic foundation for emerging enterprise architecture Contract between interoperating services – may differential decisions about responses to inputs (support behavioral semantics) Looking to integrate semantic web technologies into existing architecture Semantic concept of operations – quicker and more flexible for areas that change rapidly EAS - Enterprise Architecture Specification Vocab terminology Information Computation Enterprise/Business ACTION ITEMS: Do a better job of point people to the EAS and wiki Raise interpretation of data in town hall (use of semantic web and mapping ontologies) in town hall Get requirements in now or soon. CBIIT is ready to move ahead with semantic requirements

4 BOF #2: Development of caBIG® Comparative Effectiveness Research Enterprise Use Case What we discussed: comparative effectiveness research, predictive tools in outcomes, morbidity, risk for readmission comparative effectiveness research requires accessible data sources provided in a form that allows integration heart failure and transplant as specific domains primarily descriptions of the issues in these domains, though we began to discuss commonalities Current problems: Lots of data available, much of it unstructured Data is spread across multiple databases, including registries and clinical data warehouses — integrating them is extremely difficult but needed Future outlook: data will increasingly become available on health care processes, is there terminological support? Natural language processing support is needed to access unstructured data Next steps: define commonalities and CER needs among caBIG communities how and whether caBIG can support it

5 BOF #3: Alignment of Developer Applications to DAMs Purpose: Familiarize with Domain Analysis Model (DAM), Project Specific Analysis model, Platform Independent model (PIM) and Platform Specific Model PSMs What does Traceability between PSMs, PIM and DAM mean? How PIMs and PSMs derive from DAMs with examples from COPPA and BRIDG? E.g. Person, Person and Organization Association Discuss how it would affect the VCDE compatibility review Gaps / Action Items: VCDE/Architecture mentors and reviewers need guidance from CATs on how strict alignment to BRIDG/COPPA and LSDAM needs to be. Developers need to understand how DAMs will be expanded. Where would expansion into clinical sciences fit: BRIDG, LSDAM, third DAM? caBIG® community needs to find a way to explain to lay people and domain experts the purpose of domain analysis models and platform-independent models. Would deriving a PSM from a DAM ensure interoperability? It seems that use case/dynamic elements need to be aligned as well. DAMs should continue to develop as bottom-up (from developer models) and top- down (harmonization) processes and by described this way.

6 BOF #4: Software Engineering and Metadata Standards to Support ECCF and Service Specification Objective is to define a service interface that can be implemented in independently developed systems Want to automatically derive services semantics from the software artifacts Denise presented use of RM-ODP and MFI international standards Described points of view, stakeholders, processes, artifacts Discussion mostly focused on when the detailed specification needs to be made. Overhead of documentation is not well described yet. There is concern that this is a heavyweight approach. Software developers see specification as an overhead to creating the software because Agile and model driven are different approaches. With Agile you don’t always figure out everything up front. Consider how to reduce the overhead in the light of development practices of the community. Accommodate the ability to reverse engineer the specification. Allow for incremental development Allow for stages of completeness End of development/tie in with deliverable. Noted that what caBIG has to provide and auto generate artifacts for you, requires that you have upfront knowledge. Value of the formalism is to interoperate and communicate. Balance this with the requirement for artifacts Artifacts submitted up front with the CATs and caBIG funded development Not so for those who develop outside of caBIG. Not all software needs to interoperate For more information, please see the slides at: etadata%20Standards%20to%20Support%20ECCF%20and%20Service%20Specification.ppt etadata%20Standards%20to%20Support%20ECCF%20and%20Service%20Specification.ppt

7 BOF #5: caGrid Adoption and Adaption Key takeaways: 1. Governance 2. Guide for outside submission 3. QA strategy for outside code submission caGrid’s presence in the community is steadily increasing both in and outside of caBIG. This brings about a need to grow caGrid from a solely caBIG-based product to a broader open source/open community product. caGrid’s Touchpoints Include: caBIG CDC Minnesota CTSA BIRN Radiation Therapy cooperative groups

8 BOF #6: Harmonization of cgMDR Development Use internal terminologies (not on Grid) within the tool Quality Checking of new content (tighten governance workflow to control creation similar/same data elements) Improve search/search algorithms to surface relevant content. Complex search with name, data type/value domain. What is similar? Are there efforts in using NCIt to assist with searches. Exploit conceptual relationships to find relations between CDEs. Contextual searches Specific use searches? Search for use within form vs. model. Physical mechanisms to enable harmonization and governance of existing/new CDEs (merge and versioning)