Figure 1
caBIG® semantic infrastructure core services. Figure 1: caGrid core services, and their corresponding APIs, matched with the different levelsofthe metadata hierarchy. At the syntactic level, caGrid counts with XML Schemas to indicate the data types shared on the grid. These schemas are maintained in the Global Model Exchange, a service acting as an XML schema registry. The structural metadata is conformed by UML models, which can be accessed using the caGrid Discovery API. A metadata registry, based on the ISO/IEC 11179 standard, is used to manage common data elements (CDEs). The metadata registry, called caDSR, can be accessed with a specific API. A CDE is composed of an object class, a property and a value domain. These components correspond to a UML class, UML attribute and the attribute's data type, respectively, and each of them is associated with a set of concepts from an ontology. These mappings between structural elements and concepts constitute the reference metadata. The concepts are part of the domain metadata, and in caBIG® mainly belong to the NCI thesaurus ontology. The LexEVS API allows to access the available terminologies.