National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics (NCICB) Activities: The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has established the Center for Bloinformatics (NCICB) to provide bioinformatics support and integration of its diverse research initiatives to the cancer research community. NCICB does this, in part, by providing consistent models and comprehensive data in an accessible format to leverage the breadth of information gathered by the basic and clinical research communities. The variety and scope of the software and data sources being developed by NCICB requires substantial and independent Quality Assurance Testing of the software and data.An Experiment Archive, or XAR, is an FUGE (Functional Genomics Experiment Standard) based xml format that encapsulates experimental data along with descriptions of the materials and experimental procedures. This file format is currently used by the Computational Portal and Analysis System (CPAS) developed by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center fQr NCI's Mouse Proteomic Technologies Initiative.A proteomics repository based on CPAS is currently hosted by NCICB. The current NCICB proteomics repository includes a module to load and display mass spec experimental information, but lacks tools to create the XAR file. XAR files are currently manually created by data curators.The NCICB proteomics repository will be in production Nov, 2006. It currently provides public access for NCI funded projects, such as Mouse Proteomic Technologies Initiative (MPTI) project and Clinical Proteomic Technology Assessment for Cancer (CPTAC). As part of this project, the NCICB will construct an XAR file creation/validation tool The tool will have a graphical interface that allows users to define experiment protocols and upload data to the NCICB proteomics repository. Standard-based ontologies for mass-spec experiments will be integrated into this tool.Quality Assurance Tools at NCICB: Three applications are used to manage thequality assurance and software development processes at NCICB: TestTrackPro, Concurrent Versions System (CVS), and GForge. CVS is an open-source version control system in which documents relating to the development projectare maintained. CVS provides the development team with a central repository inwhich to store requirements documents, use cases, code, configuration files,graphics, and binaries. CVS retains each revision of a file that is committed intothe repository, which enables team members to review or rollback to anyprevious revision of a file.As part of these activities NCICB needs software Quality Assurance (QA) support to NCICB project teams to assist in the creation of high-quality, bug free software systems.
