Information on NIH Program Announcements
Sharing data and tools across a research community adds tremendous value to the efforts of that community. Search engines like Google show the power of sharing text-based data. While strides have been made, the infrastructure necessary to share and query data sets that have more than just textual biomedical data is still under development. Examples of such heterogeneous data sets include those that contain images, clinical data, or genomic/gene expression data. Two large NIH supported infrastructure projects to allow data and tool sharing are the caBIG™ program and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN).
The purpose of the NIH Program Announcements is to encourage researchers to use the caBIG™ and BIRN infrastructures to share data and tools under these infrastructures or using the infrastructure to federate significant data sets. Awards issued under these announcements will NOT provide support to develop the tools or to measure data. The goal of these programs is to make tools or data broadly available to other researchers.
For more information on the announcements, please go to Data Ontologies for Biomedical Research (R01), and Sharing Data and Tools: Federation Using the BIRN and caBIG Infrastructures (R01).
BIRN has deployed tools and infrastructure that are fostering a new biomedical collaborative culture and infrastructure. By intertwining concurrent revolutions occurring in biomedicine and information technology, BIRN is enabling researchers to participate in large-scale, cross-institutional research studies where they are able to acquire, share, analyze, mine and interpret data acquired at multiple sites using advanced processing and visualization tools. Some core components of this infrastructure, designed around a flexible large-scale grid model, include: a scalable and powerful data integration environment that allows users to access multiple databases as if they were a single database; the use and development of ontologies and data exchange standards; a user portal that provides a 'common user interface,' encouraging greater collaboration among researchers and offering access to a powerful suite of biomedical tools. More information on the BIRN, use cases highlighting its utilization, and the BIRN Data Repository are further described at this web site (http://www.nbirn.net).
caBIG™ provides a different infrastructure for tool and data federation than BIRN does. caBIG™ has developed strategic infrastructure that depends on open source software and on using commercial software where appropriate to provide interoperability, to connect users and tools through a grid infrastructure, and to provide researchers with grid-enabled applications. The software tools support basic, clinical, and translational research functions. It is expected that providing the capability for researchers to use caBIG-enabled applications will remove the technological barriers to sharing data on the grid. Ultimately, the goal of caBIG™ is to connect the research community from bench scientists to clinical researchers and on to the Food and Drug Administration. A key part of the caBIG™ strategy is to use well-defined standards for data exchange and to develop a core vocabulary so that results from multiple experiments or data streams can be compared. caBIG™ tools and infrastructure components are freely available on the caBIG™ web site (https://caBIG.nci.nih.gov).
A technical assistance workshop is planned on October 18, 2007 to answer questions about these program announcements. Participants can attend the meeting in person at the Natcher Auditorium on the NIH Campus or can participate via a videocast. To see the schedule for the workshop, click here, and to register, click here.