The NCIP Open-Development Initiative
The NCIP is committed to improving biomedical informatics through broad community participation. To this end, NCIP has deposited a large volume of open-source code for biomedical informatics software applications to GitHub, a widely used code-hosting site. GitHub allows community developers to easily access and modify the code for applications of interest, and to contribute these modifications back to the primary repository for broader community dissemination. Most of these projects are available under the standard BSD 3-clause license, to encourage both open-source and commercially viable derivatives of these projects.
The NCI Biomedical Informatics Blog
The NCI Biomedical Informatics Blog provides a forum for the exploration of ideas and knowledge sharing across the NCI and throughout the wider biomedical-informatics and cancer-research community.
Recently, Juli Klemm, Ph.D., head of the Cancer Biology and Genomics Section, NCI CBIIT, published a posting discussing community members' responses to Dr. Harold Varmus's letter asking for input on a Cancer Knowledge Cloud Initiative that would be designed to support computational needs surrounding large-scale cancer genomics efforts.
Wikis
The NCI Wiki hosts individual wikis that document the development of applications, activities of working groups, collaborations, informatics projects, and work in specific domains. Visit the wiki dashboard and select the New Account link to participate. For more information, contact Application Support.
Events
- CBIIT Speaker Series: June 26, 2013, J. Milburn Jessup, M.D., Chief, Diagnostics Evaluation Branch, NCI Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, Cancer Diagnosis Program; Principal Investigator, Laboratory of Experimental Carcinogenesis, NCI Center for Cancer Research. For more information about the series and upcoming speakers, visit the CBIIT Speaker Series Wiki. To view previous Speaker Series presentations, visit the NCI CBIIT Speaker Series YouTube Playlist.
- Functional Genomics Data Society (FGED), June 20-22, Seattle, WA, Mervi Heiskanen and Ishwar Chandramouliswaran presenting
- Open Source Summit, June 25-26, Washington, DC, Anthony Kerlavage and Juli Klemm presenting
NCIP News
- Big Data to Knowledge Initiative issues a Request for Information on developing an NIH biomedical data catalog
- Summary of Input Request — Computational Needs to Support Large-Scale Genomics Investigations
- Dr. Harold Varmus has announced that the NCI will explore the feasibility of building a publicly accessible cancer knowledge cloud or clouds.
- CBIIT has established three NCIP working groups to explore issues related to high-throughput molecular data, imaging informatics, and next-generation semantic infrastructure.
Publications
Recently published articles authored by NCIP staff and members of the community include the following:
- Thomas et al., ISA-TAB-Nano: A Specification for Sharing Nanomaterial Research Data in Spreadsheet-based Format.
- Freimuth et al., Life sciences domain analysis model.
- Fleming et al., Extending the services-oriented architecture of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid: the Ohio State University TRIAD project.
Other publications are available in the Bibliography section of the NCIP website.
