Welcome to the caBIG� Community Website —

Welcome to the caBIG� Community Website —

Pertaining to this week's theme of knowledge sharing, I checked out a huge example of knowledge sharing: the National Cancer Institute's caBIG. CaBig defines itself as a "a virtual network of interconnected data, individuals, and organizations whose goal is to redefine how research is conducted, how care is provided, and to interact with others in biomedical research.

The goals of caBIG is to adapt or build tools for interacting wth information with cancer research, connect with other in cancer research, deploy and extend standards, rules, and common languages to facilitate interoperability. The website underlines that all this is needed because there is a "critical problem facing basic and clinical researchers today: the explosion of data that requires new and different approaches in sharing data."

Each of the different areas of cancer research, such as clinical trials, tissue banks and in vivo imaging, have their own workgroup that allows like minded people to post and share their information.

caBIG also has an entire area within their network devoted to data sharing to add on additional information features that researchers may need in order to share and display their research, such as patient privacy protections and intellectual property interests. The data sharing and security framework is designed to help researchers overcome the common barriers that obstruct the ease of sharing information. As it is, this particular feature is not fully developed as people are still working on defining policies, best practices, model documents and the trust fabric. Users can select levels of proprietary values, levels of privacy and restrictions and be able to adjust amount of data sharing based on the metadata that the scientist adds to it.

The caGrid is caBIG's underlying network architecture and platform that enables the connectivity within the network. It promotes interoperability within the site and all the biomedical research tools and facilitates communication between the users/researchers to render data sharing more efficient.

All in all, the caBIG network looks promising since the ease of sharing data about cancer research is the very core of its motivation. The researchers in the field also realize the importance of sharing data and are looking for ways to improve scholarly communication.