Cross-trial query system for cancer clinical trials
Calinescu R., Harris S., Gibbons J., Davies J.
Data sharing represents one of the key objectives and major challenges of today's cancer research. CancerGrid, a consortium of clinicians, cancer researchers, computational biologists and software engineers from leading UK institutions, is developing openstandards cancer informatics addressing this challenge. The CancerGrid solution involves the representation of a widely accepted clinical trials model in controlled vocabulary and common data elements (CDEs) as the enabling factor for cancer data sharing. This paper describes a cancer data query system that supports data sharing across CancerGrid-compliant clinical trial boundaries. The formal specification of the query system allows the model-driven development of a flexible, webbased interface that cancer researchers with limited IT experience can use to identify and query common data across multiple clinical trials. © 2007 Springer.