NCBC Software Yellow-Page and Software Tool XMLTology - Charter Statement

• This document decribes an outline of the NCBC effort on developing a framework for managing the software tools developed by the NCBC centers (may include other contributors later)
• Relevant Links:
  • SW Tool Meta-data description & XMLTology Page
  • NCBC TCon on Ontology 11/17/2005
  • Workshop Details
  • Ivo Dinov's PPT slides
  • NCBC SDIWG Wiki Page
• Goals - there are three major goals of this effort (in parallel):
  • Develop an NIH/infrastructure for meta-descriptions of the NCBC computtational biology resources. Specs include:
    • Easy to enter and revise (manually and automatically) data in this framework
    • Robust behavior of the system
    • Easy to search, traverse and download tools and libraries
    • Flexible syntax of the XML descriptors
    • Curators/librarians/community-editing
  • Develop an ontology of tools of the NCBC resources.
    • Flexible XML description of all communications with the tool by an external program (communication management, input, output, state)
    • This schema should be general, scalable and decentralized
    • Services: searching, up/downloading, threaded rating/commenting (ala Wikipedia)
    • Allow display skins and easy redesign of tool traversal
  • Develop the infrastructure for integration and interoperability of tools libraries and resources developed by different investigators and groups.
    • Develop a schema for description of resource input and output data/parameters/flags that allows machine interpratation and computer-program interpretation of resources that may be strung together to form data processing and analysis workflows.