The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBig) is an effort by the National Cancer Institute to develop and disseminate information standards and software to advance oncology research and treatment. The effort includes Workgroups in several areas drawn from the NCI-supported Cancer Center system. Our lab's involvement is primarily in the Architecture Workgroup, which cuts across other workgroups, tracks their progress and identifies key architectural issues for critical analysis and communication. There is a strong Open Source and open standards theme throughout the project.

Architectural Workgroup definition from caBIG online documents

This Cross Cutting Workspace will develop policy documents, review Workspaces, work on architectural standards and provide architectural assistance as necessary to the other workspaces. The primary purpose of the Architectural Crosscutting Workspace is to ensure consistent application of the caBIG development principles to the distributed groups doing the actual integration and implementation activities throughout the caBIG project. These activities focus on extension of architecture/infrastructure frameworks and standards to support caBIG tools and data access. Topics in this workspace include: Middleware, Application and data access APIs, Data transmission formats, Web services components, Grid computing services, and security architecture.

The NCICB has made a committment to open source software and open systems. We make most of our own caCORE technologies available under an open source licensing mechanism, and we use open source technologies wherever practical. caCORE is powered by a number of Apache projects, including: HTTP Server, Tomcat, Ant, Struts, OJB, Xalan, Xerces, XML-RPC, Jakarta Commons, and POI. We also use ZOPE for web site management and JUnit for unit testing.

Reference material

• NCICB Publications, including a Dec 2003 overview of caCORE