Appendix 1: NCI Infrastructure to Support Informatics Best Practices

The NCI has identified the ability to share research data electronically as key to achieving its goal of eliminating death and suffering due to cancer. To this end, the NCI established the caBIG™, an infrastructure designed to facilitate the exchange of data and programs across the cancer research enterprise (see https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/) . Biospecimen resources are encouraged to draw on caBIG™ to implement the informatics recommendations outlined in Section B.5 of the NCI Best Practices. Of particular relevance to biospecimen resources is the Tissue Banks and Pathology Tools Workspace (TBPTW) dedicated to the integration, development, and implementation of biospecimen resource and pathology tools. As part of the TBPTW, the NCI is developing the following components:

• caTISSUE Core. An intranet/Internet-based application for managing a biospecimen resource. The caTISSUE Core also provides an object model through which existing biospecimen resource systems may be used as a standard to share biospecimen data.
• caTISSUE Clinical Annotation. An application for handling the annotation of biospecimens with clinical data.
• cancer Text Information Extraction System (caTIES) . A system for extracting concepts from free-text pathology reports into a structured data model.

The NCI supports caBIG™ compatibility of the informatics systems used by biospecimen resources as a step toward integrating biospecimen resource systems with other sources and types of data from clinical research and genomic and proteomic laboratory studies.
All caBIG™ applications are open source and free of charge. While applications like caTISSUE Core and cancer Text Information Extraction System (caTIES) are developed within caBIG's™ TBPTW, use of these tools is not expected to be the only way of achieving caBIG™ compatibility. Biospecimen resources should work with the developers of their software on making these systems interoperable with others through caBIG™ compatibility.

The caBIG™ Compatibility Guidelines provide a high-level description of requirements for interoperability (see https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/guidelines_documentation) . The caBIG™ Compatibility Guidelines are organized into four levels of maturity based on degrees of interoperability: Legacy, Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Biospecimen resources are encouraged to establish new informatics systems that are caBIG™ compatible at the silver level and to place systems that are being replaced or upgraded on a path to silver-level compliance.
Silver-level compatibility requires that systems utilize data elements defined in a common metadata repository, such as the caDSR (see http://ncicb.nci.nih.gov/infrastructure/cacore_overview/cadsr) . The caDSR and its associated services provide the infrastructure to handle standardized terminologies addressed in the caBIG™ Compatibility Guidelines. For questions or comments on the caDSR, please contact the NCICB Application Support Group via e-mail at ncicb@pop.nci.nih.gov.