The caBIG® Life Science Business Architecture Model

Abstract

Motivation: Business Architecture Models (BAMs) describe what a business does, who performs the activities, where and when activities are performed, how activities are accomplished and which data are present. The purpose of a BAM is to provide a common resource for understanding business functions and requirements and to guide software development. The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG®) Life Science BAM (LS BAM) provides a shared understanding of the vocabulary, goals and processes that are common in the business of LS research.

Results: LS BAM 1.1 includes 90 goals and 61 people and groups within Use Case and Activity Unified Modeling Language (UML) Diagrams. Here we report on the model's current release, LS BAM 1.1, its utility and usage, and plans for future use and continuing development for future releases.

Availability and implementation: The LS BAM is freely available as UML, PDF and HTML (https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/x/OFNyAQ).

Fig. 1.

caBIG LS BAM 1.1 Use Case Diagram: Top level and supporting Use Case detail. LS research activities are decomposed in a top-down approach; this UML Use Case Diagram subset shows the four most general use cases, as ovals, that represent the activities that life scientists undertake. One supporting use case, which can occur at the enterprise level of an organization or within subdivisions of the enterprise, is shown in the inset. The small icon in the bottom right corner of the use cases indicates that the use case is a composite, i.e. it has one or more child use cases.

Fig. 2.

caBIG LS BAM 1.1 Use Case Diagram: Plan Research detail. This UML Use Case Diagram includes Plan Research and its 29 child use cases, as ovals, each of which are components of the goal to plan research.

Fig. 3.

caBIG LS BAM 1.1 Exemplar Activity Diagram: Identifying and Obtaining Archival Human Tissue Biospecimens. The workflow of identifying and obtaining archival human tissue biospecimen is shown. Processes are represented as squares and decision points are triangles. Dark gray indicates tasks performed by the researcher, medium gray by the tissue bank, light gray by local personnel and white are general processes. The dashed-line box encapsulating four dark gray processes indicates that the order of these processes depends upon the policies of individual tissue banks, e.g. the research may be able to identify specific specimens or s/he may have to make a general request to the tissue bank, which will identify available specimens for the researcher.

Fig. 4.

The Translational Medicine BAM—conceptual future vision. Currently there are two mature caBIG BAMs—a LSs research BAM and a CR BAM. Work has begun to create BAMs for population sciences, cancer electronic health records and patients involved in human subjects research (Patient BAM). The vision is that these individual models will eventually be integrated to form the Translational Medicine BAM (rectangle). Areas of synergy between goals documented within the various BAMs are represented by overlap. BAM circle circumference represents the current relative maturity and size of each model.