What’s the difference between iSHARE and eSHARE?


CDISC SHARE is a metadata repository (MDR) that supports the development, governance, publishing, and consumption of the CDISC standards in human and machine-readable formats. For more information about SHARE see the CDISC Website. eSHARE and iSHARE are parts of the overall SHARE system. They represent two separate ways to access SHARE content, as shown in the diagram below.

Interactive SHARE, or iSHARE, is the tool used by the CDISC standards development community for developing, governing, and publishing the standards. iSHARE is a cloud-based MDR configured for the CDISC standards that includes a number of standards management and development tools. Prior to accessing the tool, CDISC standards team members receive both on-line and interactive iSHARE training. Each standards development project works with the SHARE Metadata Curators to create and publish new CDISC standards. As new standards, and new versions of existing standards, are created iSHARE provides tools for exporting the standards content in a number of machine-readable formats.

Exports from SHARE, or eSHARE, is a website that has the standards published from iSHARE available for easy download. The eSHARE site serves subscribers that implement the CDISC standards. eSHARE content will be available in multiple formats and multiple versions. The eSHARE content reflects published content available for export in iSHARE. Interim work-in-progress versions of a standard will not typically be published to eSHARE since they are not intended for production use. While CDISC will demonstrate the proper use of eSHARE, no formal training is required. eSHARE subscribers will have the option of receiving email notifications when new content is posted for download. eSHARE content will largely be centered on machine-readable versions of the CDISC standards metadata.

For the initial SHARE release versions of SDTM and CDASH were loaded, along with the CDISC Controlled Terminology and the BRIDG model. During the next release the SHARE team is loading content from the remaining foundational standards, in addition to updating existing content. Standards content exports will be made available for download via eSHARE in machine-readable formats, including:  ODM, Define-XML, Excel/CSV, and RDF/OWL.

Both iSHARE user and eSHARE users will be required to agree to basic licensing terms. iSHARE is based on a commercial software tool, and a license is required prior to receiving an account on the system. eSHARE access requires a subscription, and the very first subscribers will be the CDISC platinum members.

In sum, the CDISC standards teams use iSHARE to develop standards, and organizations that implement the standards use eSHARE to access machine-readable standards metadata. See the SHARE FAQ for more information on iSHARE and eSHARE. In the future, iSHARE access may be opened up to a broader community that seeks to leverage iSHARE tools to analyze standards content. CDISC also anticipates working with software tool developers to enable automated syndication of SHARE content to participating vendor applications.

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 3, 2014 at 10:38 AM

    Hi Sam, great work and nice blog!
    Very good to see semantic web versions of CDISC standards from eSHARE. A couple of questions:

    - Will you use the schemas RDF schemas https://github.com/phuse-org/rdf.cdisc.org/tree/master/schemas developed by the FDA/PhUSE Semantic Technology project http://www.phusewiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Semantic_Technology ? If so, there are some opportunities to apply learnings to improve these schemas based on the experiences from representing CDISC fundamental standard https://github.com/phuse-org/rdf.cdisc.org/tree/master/std s.

    - What formats are you planning to serialize the RDF modelled data exports in? The experiences from many semantic web/linked data projects are that Turtle (ttl) and JSON-LD version are preferred by developers over XML.

    - Any plans to provide a URI resolver service for individual standards items, e.g. resolve the URI for the VSTESTCD data element to a URL for with the descriptions of it and links to other items, as supplement to bulk exports?

    KUTGW

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sam Hume, DScAugust 6, 2014 at 7:29 AM

      Thanks Kerstin. The public review period for the CDISC standards in RDF will begin soon. Please submit you comments so they're part of the official review. We'll likely look to setup a meeting with you to discuss them further. I believe the serialization format will be Turtle. There are no current plans for a URI resolver service, but this would make a good comment during the public review.

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