Abstract
Motivation: The complexity of cancer is prompting researchers to find
new ways to synthesize information from diverse data sources and
to carry out coordinated research efforts that span multiple institutions.
There is a need for standard applications, common data models, and
software infrastructure to enable more efficient access to and sharing
of distributed computational resources in cancer research. To address
this need the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has initiated a national-scale
effort, called the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIGTM),
to develop a federation of interoperable research information systems.
Results: At the heart of the caBIG approach to federated interoperability
effort is a Grid middleware infrastructure, called caGrid. In this
paper we describe the caGrid framework and its current implementation,
caGrid version 0.5. caGrid is a model-driven and service-oriented
architecture that synthesizes and extends a number of technologies
to provide a standardized framework for the advertising, discovery,
and invocation of data and analytical resources. We expect caGrid
to greatly facilitate the launch and ongoing management of coordinated
cancer research studies involving multiple institutions, to provide
the ability to manage and securely share information and analytic
resources, and to spur a new generation of research applications
that empower researchers to take a more integrative, trans-domain
approach to data mining and analysis.
Availability: The caGrid version 0.5 release can be downloaded from
https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/workspaces/Architecture/caGrid/. The operational
test bed Grid can be accessed through the client included in the
release, or through the caGrid-browser web application http://cagrid-browser.nci.nih.gov.
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