Project Description
Guided by Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable-Therapeutic Lifestyle Counseling (FAIR-TLC) principles, this project aims to collaboratively develop, advance, and promote an ecosystem for open-source translational software projects and the creation of aligned communities of practice. This project has three aims:
- Establish a CTSA Tool Registry to facilitate discovery and confident adoption, as well as implementation of tools and algorithms by CTSA investigators
- Enable automatic or semi-automatic creation and sharing of Standard Containers and associated deployment tools and documentation
- Complete the EHR DREAM Challenge and demonstrate proof-of-concept architecture using DREAM Challenge models as exemplar for standardized tools
CTSA Tool Registry: A tool registry will provide a central listing of software resources at various stages of maturity and readiness for adoption, as well as extensive documentation and resources for following best practices for software and infrastructure. In Phase III, we will (1) design tool registration and curation schemas, user interfaces, and an application programming interface (API). Records in the Tool Registry will combine descriptive metadata about a piece of software’s origin and purpose, along with richer semantics to enable discovery and reuse. In addition to descriptive metadata and documentation for each tool, the registry will provide standard mechanisms for access and use; (2) develop software quality and validation schemas and a prototype infrastructure. A critical function of the Tool Registry will be to provide a transparent and independently verified indicator of the quality and maturity of software resources
Standard Containers: The shareability of innovative software within the CTSA community depends on the ability of software developers and informaticians to package their software and dependencies as deployable Docker Container Images (or other similar technologies) such that other researchers can simply pull and run them. In response to such needs, this project will evaluate the needs of the CTSA community and existing open-source technologies to enable a cloud-based registry of available tools in which CTSA hubs can develop, evaluate, and share for bioinformatics research.
EHR Evaluation Network: We launched the EHR DREAM Challenge in September 2019 as a Phase II project, and expect to conclude the Open Challenge Phase in the middle of Phase III. The Challenge to date has succeeded in (i) engaging CTSAs and the broader biomedical community around predictive analytics on clinical data; (ii) demonstrating feasibility of a novel data sharing paradigm for using sensitive patient data in a secure manner; and (iii) advancing infrastructure for federated analytics. In phase 3, we will move into the Collaborative Challenge Phase, we will invite top performing participants to engage in a collaboration to explore and document the results of the challenge, and describe lessons learned.
