Publication and consumption of caBIG data services using .NET

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) is revolutionizing the way medical researchers share information and collaborate. A key to caBIG’s continued success will be interoperability. However, to date, only a single code base (in Java) has been used to create a set of tools and run-time services for caBIG. This paper presents the first significant exploration into the use of Microsoft’s .NET Framework and Visual Studio for caBIG. Given its substantial existing community, a .NET-based set of tools for caBIG can significantly increase the pool of qualified software designers and developers for caBIG. Arguably more importantly, a second development foundation could facilitate revisiting a broad set of design decisions made to date in caBIG that have perhaps been unduly based directly or indirectly on a single underlying software technology. We begin by describing issues we have encountered in building relatively simple .NET-based clients to existing caBIG services. Next, we describe how we leverage Microsoft ADO.NET Data Services as the foundation for caBIG Data Services, in particular for the caBIO data set. We find ADO.NET Data Services has a uniquely strong potential to facilitate rapid development and deployment. We conclude with a discussion of the roadmap of our project’s future activities.