Using the Semantically Interoperable Biospecimen Repository Application, caTissue: End User Deployment Lessons Learned

Abstract

The goal of the National Cancer Institute’s cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid initiative, or caBIG®, is the ability to share data and resources among cancer researchers. One means to achieving this goal is the development of semantically interoperable informatics tools based on common data models and controlled vocabularies. A tool for managing biospecimen repositories, caTissue, enables investigators to query for available tissues that are relevant to the needs of their research. For this functionality, the caTissue application data model must include annotation describing various specimen characteristics, and have this information accessible for query by the researcher end user. Having deployed caTissue over two years at Thomas Jefferson University, we report the lessons learned from our investigators’ use of this complex, semantically interoperable software application. Overall we have found that object model complexity and semantic completeness pose obstacles to end user accessibility that require effective strategies to overcome.