Community Code Contribution and Integration WG Wiki

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), through its cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid®, or caBIG®, initiative has developed an information network that connects the cancer research community and enables the sharing of tools and data through a common, standards-based electronic infrastructure.  The NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT) conducts the caBIG® initiative, first as a pilot during 2004-2006 and then launched the enterprise phase of caBIG® in early 2007 with an emphasis on widespread institutional adoption of the program and tools.

Since its inception, over 70 tools have been developed through the caBIG® program, all of which follow the caBIG® guidelines of "open source, open access, open development and federation" and are accordingly covered by a non-viral open source license. In 2010 and 2011, the program has approached an inflexion point due to a number of factors, including:

• the expansion of caBIG®'s scope beyond the natural home of the National Cancer Institute
• tangible evidence of extra-governmental groups (including private organizations and groups outside the United States) wanting to contribute to the program, either financially or in kind

Access to the source code of caBIG®'s tools has allowed adopting organizations to themselves customize tools of interest, to better support the specific requirements of their environment.  At present, however, there is not a consistent mechanism for contributing this custom code back to the main distribution of the tool; therefore, customizations that may be freely offered and broadly useful are not readily available to other groups.  Moreover, organizations that have a locally customized version of the code cannot readily accept upgrades to the main distribution and therefore will be out of synch with the regular releases.

To address the need for a sustainable support and development plan for a caBIG® tool collection that leverages community-developed enhancements, the Community Code Working Group has been established.  The charter of this group is to identify the issues and needs related to business and technical governance, as well as the necessary components of a technical infrastructure, needed to support a truly open, collaborative development initiative.  The cancer research community has an increasing need for the informatics capabilities that caBIG® has developed, in order to collect, aggregate, integrate, analyze, and disseminate massive amounts of complex, multi-dimensional data ranging from molecular data to imaging data to clinical outcomes data.

  By working with the open source community, the caBIG® program aspires to involve a broader community of IT professionals from diverse fields to bring their expertise to bear on this portfolio of tools that will directly enable researchers to develop new strategies for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer to improve patient outcomes.