Cancer Common Ontologic Representation Environment (caCORE)

caCORE tools and APIs are developed by the National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT) to provide building blocks for development of interoperable information management systems, enabling data sharing from the scientific bench to the clinical bedside and back.

caCORE includes the following key components:

• EVS (Enterprise Vocabulary Services) for hosting and managing vocabulary.
• caDSR (Cancer Data Standards Registry and Repository) for hosting and managing metadata.
• caCORE SDK, the GUI-based caCORE Workbench, and associated tools for model-driven software engineering of systems which can be easily integrated with caGrid.

EVS and the caDSR database and tools are the basis of semantics for interoperable data and analytical services.

Developers use caCORE components to create "caCORE-like" systems. By definition these systems have object-oriented information models registered in caDSR whose meaning is linked to EVS vocabularies, and have open, public APIs and web services to provide access to the data. The caBIO data service is an example of a caCORE-like system developed using caCORE components.

Using caCORE tools, developers adapt and build applications that are caBIG® compatible, that is, interoperable with other caBIG® tools.

Implementing caCORE

caCORE components are available under an open source license from the download center.

The caCORE Build Process Diagram illustrates how the caCORE tools work together and rely on caDSR and EVS.

The following describes the caCORE tools.

• caAdapter: An open source tool set that provides model mapping services in support of caCORE and facilitates data mapping and transformation among different kinds of data sources including HL7 v2 messages, HL7 v3 messages, and Regulatory Data Sets.
• caCORE Software Development Kit (SDK): A model-driven software engineering tool for creating caBIG® compatible systems which can be easily integrated with caGrid.
• caCORE Workbench: A GUI-based tool designed to facilitate use of the tools to create a caBIG® silver or gold compliant system and to create a data or analytical service on caGrid.
• Common Security Module (CSM): A library of security routines for authentication, authorization, and user provisioning.
• Common Logging Module (CLM): A library of auditing and logging routines implemented in a flexible and comprehensive solution.

Model-driven software engineering is also supported by the Semantic Integration Workbench (SIW), and the UML Loader.

caCORE Development Process

caCORE components are developed using an iterative methodology. Products and services are released independently, giving developers flexibility in responding to end user needs related to each component. Development of each product is supported by a GForge project, a wiki and technical and programming guides.