SemanticBits LLC - Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid Portal (caGRID Portal)

caGrid Portal

Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid Portal

There is a distinct need for a centralized user interface for discovering, querying, and mining the resources that are federated across the grid. The portal fills this gap by serving as the primary visualization tool for the caGrid middleware and provides a standards-based platform for hosting caBIG-related tools. Using the caGrid portal, users have instant access to information about caBIG participants, caGrid points of contact (POCs), and caGrid-related news and events. SemanticBits has designed, architected, and implemented the caGrid Portal for use in the production caGrid deployment at the National Cancer Institute.

caGrid is designed to solve the problem of sharing data and analytical resources in an environment where resources are hosted by multiple organizations and located in multiple administrative and security domains. Therefore, there is a distinct need for a centralized user interface for discovering, querying, and mining the resources that are federated across the grid. This is especially true for services that cross applications and domains.

The caGrid Portal is a JSR-168 compliant web-based application that enables users to discover and interact with the services that are available on the caGrid infrastructure. The portal serves as the primary visualization tool for the caGrid middleware and provides a standards-based platform for hosting caBIG-related tools. It also serves as a caBIG information source. Using the caGrid portal, users have instant access to information about caBIG participants, caGrid points of contact (POCs), and caGrid-related news and events.s

The caGrid Portal has the following high-level functions:

Discovery: find services, data, persons, and organizations using full text, keyword, and controlled terminologies. View this information overlayed on a map or through a service browser.
Service Metadata Exploration: to support the caBIG goals of syntactic and semantic interoperability, caGrid services expose a rich, standard set of metadata. This metadata not only describes the operations that the services support; it also links the data types that those operations use to concepts. The caGrid Portal allows users to browse these rich terminologies and data definitions.
Data Service Query: the portal allows users to construct complex queries with simple drop-down interfaces to underlying grid services, execute them, and then browse the results regardless of where the service is deployed.
Distributed Queries: the caGrid Portal additionally allows users to build queries that cross services, providing a mechanism to do distributed joins and aggregating results behind the scenes for the user.
Portlets: the caGrid Portal provides a mechanism to include user-defined portlets, such a tissue banking, clinical trials, and bioinformatics analysis portlets
Security: the portal integrates with the caGrid security infrastructure, allowing users to login with grid credentials, perform queries and analysis as grid users, and single sign-on across portal applications.

The caGrid Portal is built upon a set of open source, industry standard libraries and frameworks, including:

Spring: Spring is used in various layers of caGrid Portal. In all layers, Spring provides dependency injection and object lifecycle management. In the presentation layer, both Spring MVC and Spring Portlet MVC are used. In the service and DAO layers, Spring provides declarative transaction demarcation.
Hibernate: Provides object/relational persistence strategy
Velocity: Rendering of portal layouts and decorations
JSP: Rendering of portal views
jQuery, Scriptaculous, YUI: Javascript libraries for client-side effects
DWR: AJAX framework for asynchronous communication
Acegi Security: Secure channel processing
Liferay: JSR-168 compliant Portal platform
JBoss and Tomcat: Application server
Lucene based indexing and SOLR REST web services to enable searching in the Portal

The caGrid portal is deployed at the National Cancer Institute on the caGrid Production tier, which is publicly accessible to the entire cancer search community.

SemanticBits has designed, architected, and implemented the caGrid Portal for use in the production caGrid deployment at the National Cancer Institute. Our expertise in portal technologies provides us the depth of understanding necessary to integrate applications, services, and data enterprise-wide.

The caGrid Portal version 1.0 was released in December, 2006, version 2.0 in December 2007, and version 2.2 was released February, 2009. The next version of the Portal is currently under user acceptance testing and will be released in the last quarter of 2009.