Mbirn: March 10, 2005:
Meeting minutes for mBIRN Informatics teleconference, 3/10/05
1. There was general agreement that the Spring meeting had been productive and pleasant.
2. Jorge stressed the importance of everyone updating their section(s) of the Wiki. We need to report on work for the 6 months after the October AHM and to evaluate our progress against the goals agreed on at the AHM. There will be an 8-month review in 2-3 months, for which we need to document our progress thoroughly. Jorge will be obtaining the specific reporting requirements from NCRR and will pass them on to us.
It is also very important that we make sure that we keep documenting our work for subsequent annual reviews.
3. Data Provenance: Nicole was in agreement with the plan presented at the Spring meeting. She has a dependency on the HID subgroup to help her insert Provenance data into the HID. Specifically, she needs an updated description and a Data Dictionary for the HID schema, Dingying said she would get these, with help from Jeff and Burak. It was also suggested that we look into making the current JPEG and Postscript documents describing the schema more readily available to everyone. Similar needs will arise when XNAT becomes available.
4.Data Management: It was pointed out that the MGH query interface improvements will require development resources beyond template definition. Heidi volunteered for this task. The status of the BIRN-CC Mediator was of some concern, both for data integration and as a dependency of the other Ontology projects underway (Christine's clinical prototype and Haystack). Burak went into quite a lot of detail describing the work that will need to be done at each site in order to use it. This involves work in addition to registration of your database and encoding queries in Mediator "Views". Apparently, each site also has to implement code enabling the site database to communicate with the Mediator.
The result of this discussion was that
(a) we need to test the 2.0 release of the Mediator to see how much effort is involved in making it useable and then
(b) communicate the sites' feedback and requirements (based on this testing) to BIRN-CC
(c) decide whether the CC Mediator has the potential for being a viable tool for data integration for us. Burak, Chris, Jeff and Amarnath will be meeting to investigate these issues.
5. Workflow Management: The aim of the Workflow Management group in the next 6 months is to produce a standard for BIRN. There will be a teleconference on 3/17 to kick off this program. Burak reported that his experience with the 'Shark enHydra' Workflow Engine was not good. In his opinion, it is 'bloated', buggy and difficult to maintain. He has chosen to use the JBPM Workflow Engine, which is 'thin' and very efficient for his current task.
