Pointers to information about caBIG
Here are some pointers to information (circa 2009) related to caBIG.
These sources start with more general information and become more specific and/or
"technically oriented."
The first paper places caBIG in the context of other approaches to "cyberinfrastructure" for life
sciences. It summarizes the features of caBIG, and also raises the issue of the "top-down" program
managment style used by caBIG, and briefly discusses the rate of diffusion.
The next 2 papers provide more detailed overviews of caBIG. These papers seem to me to display an
interesting mix of objective description and advertising rhetoric.
These next two overviews provide some of the same information with additional detail like a
(short, older) list of current caBIG-compatible software tools.
(The current count of such tools may have grown to over 100.
The Covitz slide set is very well done, and is much more "visually oriented" than the other papers.
The next two papers discuss the Model Driven Architecture and Unified Modelling Language (UML).
This is mostly important to software developers, but fundamental to the overall vision, and necessarily
of interest to domain scientists who are thinking about making their "legacy" data bases
caBIG-compatible.
The following web pages give you some idea of caBIG as experienced by applications developers, and
the NCI approach to outsourcing caBIG development.
Here are a couple of other useful resources: one "technical" and one detailed:
Important themes in these papers and the caBIG approach seem to me to be:
- Finding a balance between the needs of science researchers and clinical practitioners.
- Developing approaches to sharing data among all stakeholders.
- Developing tools that will be useful to all stakeholders, and utilize and/or facilitate
data sharing.
- Finding a balance between centralized and decentralized decision-making within a
(partially) open-source development effort.
- Finding a balance between in-house and out-sourced technology development, management,
dissemination, training, etc.
Semantic Modeling is another topic area that should probably be included in this list.
Several of the papers above include discussions
of the caBIG approach to semantic inter-operability, but they don't provide
systematic introductions to general concepts and practice.