The Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium was created in January 2001 at the request of the life science community who lobbied to a number of groups through various channels. These channels included Sun Microsystems Informatics Advisory Council, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and its members, and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) among others. All organizations soon realized that they had been asked to fulfill the same needs (The Sun IAC Summit 2000 Report lists the #1 need of the community as an open platform to support data interoperability across all the life sciences and the #2 need as control over the proliferation of standards and standards bodies). The request was to coordinate the disparate efforts around the globe in a way that would help drive data and tool interoperability across the value chain (from target identification through validation, lead development and clinical trials all the way to branding, marketing and distribution of the end product) through the establishment of common protocols towards the goal of accelerating discovery. Seven interested organizations were then invited to the first meeting held in Research Triangle Park, NC January, 11, 2001, including: BIO, Blackstone Technology Group, INCOGEN, LabBook, Oracle, Sun & TimeLogic. INCOGEN took a lead and went on to coordinate the development of the first demonstration of a potential I3C implementation with LabBook. These organizations were quickly joined by many others including NCI, IBM, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Silicon Genetics, BioQ and a host of other organizations and individuals (Eric Neumann in particular) at several subsequent meetings. All helped shape and drive the launching of the I3C.
After only 4 meetings, there are now 40+ organizations involved and the initiative is growing. Organization, infrastructure and the general approach to achieving our goals continue to evolve but, overall, we are making significant forward progress. We believe that duplication and redundancy in our community have impeded the pace of discovery and have thus made a point of reviewing other standards initiatives, such as the W3C, ebXML, OASIS, the OMG-LSR, CDISC and others so that we may use them as models and extensions to expedite overall progress. The I3C openly acknowledges and applauds the efforts put forth by these active standards groups within the life science community and the information technology sectors.
We believe that our approach is unique. As such, we do not regard ourselves as a traditional Standards Body, rather, we view the I3C as a guided group intent on producing recommendations, similar to CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium). This is a consensus-based initiative by the community, for the community. We feel that our community advances at such a rapid pace that solutions a combination of scientific use-case representations and fully documented and open technical implementations rather than just specifications must be produced. The criteria to measure our success as a group will include the timely delivery and broad availability of solutions with multi-domain capabilities, interoperability independent of vendor, and satisfaction of key use-cases which are representative of the common bottlenecks shared by the community as a whole. Traditional Standards Bodies, such as the OMG-LSR, will potentially serve as the ideal forum to review the technical recommendations prepared by the I3C.
Our deliverables will include scientific use-cases, documented technical recommendations plus the actual implementations themselves. The Platform Workgroup will use an approach to develop use-case models and solutions to defined problems based on open, iterative methodologies. Use-cases will be based on a generic template where defined criteria must be met. Then, use-case teams will be formed and comprised of both technical vendors and end-user scientific representatives from specific domains. It is expected that a Discovery Workgroup, will also follow this model and generate their specific use-cases. The Platform Workgroup is to be more focused on solutions that will contribute to an overall framework while the Discovery Workgroup is more focused on specific niche solutions that will extend the general architecture. The Organization Workgroup will be focused on logistics, policies and procedures, and other administrative aspects of the I3C.
Problem Statement
In todays post-genomic era, hundreds of novel targets for drug and agricultural product development now exist and thousands more are on the horizon. Moreover, it may now be finally possible to begin to understand the underlying molecular causes of disease leading to the potential of developing and delivering medicines that are personalized to the genomic profiles of specific human populations or crop plants that are tailored to suit the conditions of the variable environments in which they are grown. However these opportunities bring with them many challenges. First and foremost is the investment in technology, particularly software, required to make use of genomic information in the development of new products that positively impact our daily living.
The life science community as a whole is deeply interested in having a complete set of robust, capable, off-the-shelf commercial software components and frameworks which allow it to exploit the information provided by genomics and to integrate it fully into the discovery and development process.
No point solution is enough, nor can a single company cover the entire space effectively. A substantial part of the value in any point solution lies in its ability to integrate with information produced elsewhere in the drug development process, i.e. information generated using other software.
Today, there is still no broadly accepted interoperability framework for this sharing and exchange of massively increasing amounts of potentially very valuable data. Can the pharmaceutical, chemical and agricultural industries in conjunction with the academics and IT experts develop such collaborative frameworks in a reasonable period of time? That is the question and challenge posed to I3C on our blog.
Criteria for Success of I3C
Our main criterion of success for the I3C Platform effort is the commercial availability of interoperable software solution sets. These solution-sets will:
function within or across specified domains,
have certain agreed characteristics,
be available by the milestone dates specified in this Roadmap,
be fully interoperable independent of vendor, and
satisfy the specified Domain Use-case solution sets.
The true measure of our success will be the commercial and/or open source availability of these implementations and their successful application by customers to develop drugs, chemicals, enhanced food production, etc. We believe that successful industrial adoption and practice is the ultimate test of any standard.
1. The Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C) is an open, global effort launched to coordinate and guide the design and development of methodologies and software which support data and tool interoperability.
2. The collective goal of the I3C is to accelerate discovery and development in life sciences.
3. The approach is unique: scientific use-cases, which exemplify common bottlenecks, will be used to guide the development of solutions that are fully documented recommendations for implementation of the use-case and are coupled with actual implementations.
4. To avoid duplication of effort, we follow methods, protocols, policies, etc. of other groups wherever possible as extended models for I3C and look to form alliances with such groups whenever appropriate to do so.
5. Participation is for any not-for-profit organization, academic or government research institution, or commercial organization focused on life sciences willing to commit relevant resources.
6. To date, we meet about twice per quarter and have only created a Platform Workgroup other workgroups, including Organization & Infrastructure, as well as focused Use-case Workgroups are encouraged to form.
7. We aim to produce at least one solution every year, but we openly acknowledge that this may be ambitious given that the individuals and organizations participating in such efforts volunteer their time.
The elements below must be reflected in each use-case:
define a hypothesis
design an experiment
run an experiment in high-throughput mode
data acquisition
analysis (primary)
interpretation
analysis (secondary) integration & modeling
NOTE THAT: scheduling & workflow are important aspects; interface to at least 1 data repository is required; interface to at least 1 HTS technology is required.
Milestones to Date
Jan. 11 - 7 organizations, including: Blackstone, BIO, INCOGEN, LabBook, Oracle, Sun & TimeLogic met to discuss the possibility of working together to develop the concepts behind I3C.
Feb. 21 a panel discussion at the BIO Investors Conference with initial members and the National Cancer Institute met in New York to formally launch the I3C.
Mar. 20 Technical Planning Meeting in Menlo Park about 30 organizations participated and 2 workgroups evolved: Platform & Discovery.
May 1 Platform Workgroup Meeting in Cambridge, MA established the team-based use-case approach with a use-case template and required elements definition. I3C was informally dubbed as a guided de facto standards group -- i.e. solutions will emerge from the use-case teams spawned by the I3C where a scientific use-case + technical recommendation + actual implementation rather than a standard document will be produced by each team.
May 22 Nasdaq Panel held in Palo Alto (BIO, IBM, Millennium, Sun).
May 23 C21 Ventures Conference held in San Francisco (BIO, IBM, Millennium, Sun).
June 4 AUTM (Association University Technology Managers) Conference Panel Discussion took place in Norfolk, VA (BIO, George Mason University, Informax, NCI, Sun).
June 24-27 BIO Conference in San Diego I3C will unveil the use-case approach & guidelines, plus the first use-case and first technical recommendation for implementation, plus one implementation as a demonstration of XML to illustrate that it is possible to connect data and tools from more than eight organizations, featuring competitors all working together toward a common goal.