caGrid-Enabled caBIG(TM) Silver Level Compatible Head and Neck Cancer Tissue Database System

There are huge amounts of biomedical data generated by research labs in each cancer institution. The data are stored in various formats and accessed through numerous interfaces. It is very difficult to exchange and integrate the data among different cancer institutions, even among different research labs within the same institution, in order to discover useful biomedical knowledge for the healthcare community. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a caGrid-enabled caBIG(TM) silver level compatible head and neck cancer tissue database system. The system is implemented using a set of open source software and tools developed by the NCI, such as the caCORE SDK and caGrid. The head and neck cancer tissue database system has four interfaces: Web-based, Java API, XML utility, and Web service. The system has been shown to provide robust and programmatically accessible biomedical information services that syntactically and semantically interoperate with other resources.