When the first round of i2b2 was proposed. It was not anticipated that the very significant adoption and dissemination (see Progress Report) would have occurred within the first five years. Rather it was seen as a development likely to occur in an eventual second round of i2b2 funding. With half of the CTSA awardees adopting all or part of i2b2, as well as dozens of other academic medical centers, national and internationally, and the members ofthe private sector (pharmaceutical Industry and technology providers) there has emerged a community of public-spirited developers commercial developers who have created additional functionality, alternate functionality and improvements over the existing I2b2 code base. This includes ontology services, EDO applications. Image transport and storage, distributed queries across multiple i2b2 instances, and data visualization, to name but a few. We are responding to this opportunity by planning a full-fledged communityengaged open source process. We do so with a governance structure that is inclusive and that calls for rotating membership. We also do it with an eye to having a continuing and lasting i2b2 effort once NCBC funding ends. Importantly we have described in the detail of Core 3 a transparent process for deciding which community additions are included as core or ancillary within the i2b2 software distribution and how the integration/test/debug/documentation cycle for each contribution is queued. In addition to this community engagement a central function of Core 3 will be to maintain the core i2b2 software platform such that it Is able to support the national and regional installations of the softvvare and assure their continued operation. This includes the internal operations of i2b2 and its DBPs, as well as the external sites who have adopted i2b2. A professional open-source software approach will be used to maintain the software in so far that there will be two distinct approaches to the i2b2 software. There will be a wholeproduct offering that will be supported with industrial partnerships and offer those adopting the I2b2 platform a stable, well supported version ofthe I2b2 platform, and there will be a offering forthe community which is geared toward making available the latest code and technical specifications. This leads to the second specific aim of core 3 which is the establishment of several standard distributions that will be based upon a virtual machine (VM) architecture. This will ensure a secure and manageable installation """"""""out of the box"""""""" when deployed to the healthcare centers. Finally, Core 3 will continue to support the extensive storage and computational requirement for the I2b2 DBPs to conduct their Investigations. In this regard. Partners Healthcare, Inc, has committed a significant in-kind contribution to this computational infrastructure support.
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