news in 2007

HL7 Value Sets Summit (11-12 Mar 2007)

CancerGrid were present at a summit on Coded Value Sets in Salt Lake City, UT, convened by the Mayo clinic to discuss overlaps bewteen HL7 and other research projects.

CancerGrid presented (Peter Maccallum), alongside representatives from the US National Cancer Institute, the US Centers for Disease Control, the LexGrid project , and HL7. In the ensuing discussions overlaps between the NCICB/CancerGrid approach to metadata, the HL7 system and the CDC's own solutions were felt to be great enough to justify the formation of a consortium to support development of a consensus approach, and possibly a common architecture.

You can find the presentations and follow the progress of the Value Sets Consortium at http://www.valuesets.org.

MRC e-Science All Hands Meeting (27 Feb 2007)

We attended the annual MRC meeting for e-Science projects in London, with a plenary given by Carole Goble of Manchester and talks by each of the projects.

Richard Begent and Steve Harris gave an overview of CancerGrid progress, with emphasis on our work with Common Data Elements and structured metadata.

caBIG Annual Meeting (5-8 Feb 2007) Jim Davies, Steve Harris and Peter Maccallum attended the 2007 NCICB caBIG annual meeting. The CancerGrid team gave a demonstration of semantic integration between US and UK resources based on structured clinical trial representations and web services. The demonstration showed the CancerGrid approach to data integration being used in a Java and .NET based UK system and also in a Microsoft Sharepoint system hosted by the US Department of Veterans' Affairs Cooperative Studies Programme in Boston. We also spoke on a panel session on federated terminologies.

Breast Cancer Phase III Common Data Element Review Meeting (16 Jan 2007)

"A team of clinical trial specialists will review the CancerGrid common data elements for the NEAT, tAnGo and neo-tAnGo clinical trials."

This meeting was held at the CRUK CRI. A panel of statisticians, clinicians, researchers and informatics experts provided some useful insights into what makes a good common data element and what sort of criteria should be used to judge CDEs, and what links they should provide to external classification schemes.

The results of the review will form part of the published metadata for the NEAT, tAnGO and neo-tAnGo trials.

Technical Meeting (15-16 Jan 2007) "The 2007 CancerGrid Technical Meeting will be held at the new CRUK Cambridge Research Institute in parallel with the Scientific Steering Committee Meeting, Project Board Meeting and Review of the CancerGrid Breast Cancer Phase III Trial Common Data Elements."