The National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Informatics Initiative is developing new technologies and approaches to link multiple sources of cancer research data through one internet portal. This portal, the NCRI Oncology Information Exchange (ONIX), will allow scientists to easily discover, share and utilise data.
Data Standards
We support the development and use of standards for describing, formatting submitting and exchanging data and are working with the relevant communities to evaluate and promote the use of such standards. In addition, through our online tool the Cancer InfoMatrix, we support researchers in identifying the most appropriate standards for their research area.
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Data Sharing
We are working with the leading funders of cancer research in the UK to ensure that data sharing within the scientific community becomes normal practice. This began with the development of the NCRI Data Sharing Policy and now continues with the leading funders implementing this policy in a manner than suits the requirements of the type of research that they fund.
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NCRI ONIX
We have deployed and continue to develop a web-based tool, the NCRI Oncology Information Exchange (NCRI ONIX) that will provide a single location through which researchers can access information describing the data, resources and standards being generated in all fields of cancer research.
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Joint Conference 2011
The fifth Joint Conference of the U.S. National Cancer Institute cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid® (caBIG®) and the U.K. National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Informatics Initiative took place in London on June 13-14, 2011.
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National Institute for Health Research - Research Capability Programme (NIHR RCP)
The NCRI Informatics Initiative is jointly funded and overseen by the NCRI and the NIHR RCP. Our work with the NIHR RCP enables us to start to widen the scope of our activities to other disease areas allowing us to explore how informatics may be used to maximise the impact of all healthcare research in the UK. The NIHR RCP allows us to explore the challenging area of clinical data and how we can begin to address some of the issues associated with securely accessing and integrating it with other research information. We will thus embark on a number of defined work packages with the NIHR RCP to evaluate these issues. The work packages (WP) include:
- The generation of a catalogue of NHS Data Sets to be included in ONIX’s federated catalogue of resources (WP1)
- The display of metadata describing resources in the above NHS Data Sets Catalogue (WP2)
- Secure File Transfer (WP3)
- The development of consistent data access processes across different organisations (WP4)
- Engagement with the research community (WP5)