Measurable Interoperability for Archival Data Lewis J. Frey, PhD

‹#› Objective Discuss the importance of using measures to assess interoperability

‹#› National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG ® ) “Connect scientists and practitioners through a shareable and interoperable infrastructure” “Develop standard rules and a common language to more easily share information” “Build or adapt tools for collecting, analyzing, integrating, and disseminating information associated with cancer research and care. “ “The mission of caBIG™ is to develop a truly collaborative information network that accelerates the discovery of new approaches for the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer, ultimately improving patient outcomes.” 1. About caBIG ™ accessed July 25, 2008 caBIG is an initiative to connect scientists and practitioners with standards based tools and services to ultimately improve patient outcomes.

‹#› Information tsunami and the tower of Babel The Information Tsunami –The ever increasing and overwhelming volume of data –Multitude of data sources (clinical, genetic, epidemiologic, etc…) A Research Tower of Babel –Each research community speaks its own scientific “dialect” resulting in a confusion of tongues –Integration is critical to achieve understanding & synthesizing findings for discovery Material adapted from:

‹#› caBIG Interoperability ability of a system to access and use the parts or equipment of another system Semantic interoperability Syntactic interoperability

‹#› HL7 Interoperability

‹#› Measurable Interoperability Quantification of shared meaning and means of information communication Measures –reuse of data representation –error free operations on data within and between institutions/systems –reproducibility of results stored in data archives

‹#› Unified Modeling Language 7/14/2015 8

‹#› ISO Corresponding metadata representation Common Data Element –Value Domain –Data Element Concepts  Object Class  Property Enterprise Vocabulary Service (EVS) 7/14/2015 9

‹#› UML Mapping to CDE example 7/14/

‹#› Limitations In order to maximize interoperability it is important to reuse metadata objects A difficulty of the infrastructure has been the scalability of binding terminology to UML objects through the use of human curators. The ISO object-oriented data representation has also put constraints on the representation of objects that has resulted in the inability to reuse objects among applications. 7/14/

‹#› Conclusion caBIG infrastructure provides a working system on which to measure interoperability in terms of the meaning and means of information communication Infrastructures can be compared using interoperability measures to choose systems that meet stakeholder needs Data archives can move to infrastructures that provide the greatest benefit for sharing their resources