This is the home page for the Shared Semantic Infrastructure Service.

The Shared SI Service is a product of the Semantic Infrastructure (SI) group of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) at the NCI. The SI group of CBIIT runs the Cancer Data Elements Registry and Repository (caDSR) and Enterprise Vocabulary Services (EVS), which develop and publish standard data elements and terminology used at the NCI.

The Shared SI Service is meant to provide:

• An integrated view of metadata and terminologies produced by SI.
  • Currently the only terminology found in this service is the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt).
  • In the future it might include terminologies & models/metadata not produced or published by SI.
• Fast response to queries across datasets.
  • The RDF representation is very useful for navigating between the data element and terminology spaces.
  • These navigational queries are very fast in an RDF quadstore.
• Support for federation (service keyword in SPARQL) to other public endpoints with data of interest.
  • In this case, the metadata and terminologies in this service can be used to support joins across external datasets.

The Shared SI Service facilitates the cross-resource querying of metadata and terminology in EVS and caDSR. Each dataset is represented as RDF , stored in its own named graph, and accessible via a public SPARQL 1.1  endpoint. External public endpoints can be queried as well.

This web site is a front for the endpoint and provides a query editor for ad hoc queries to examine these resources, as well as to ease development of queries of interest to end-users before they encode them in their own applications. At present, only the public SPARQL endpoint is available, a public REST API is not yet provided but is in our development roadmap.

For additional information, please examine the other pages in this web site, or send us e-mail at NCIAppSupport@nih.gov.