William K. Barnett
Informatics Core for the Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
The Informatics Core is part of the "Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders" (CIFASD). The CIFASD will continue to coordinate basic, behavioral, and clinical investigators in a multidisciplinary, cross-cultural research project to better characterize, identify, treat, and provide interventions for FASD. It will involve the input and contributions from basic researchers, behavioral scientists, and clinical investigators using novel techniques and translational approaches to achieve results that would not otherwise be possible.
The Informatics Core will maintain and expand the CIFASD Central Repository, which will continue to be used to collect, maintain and distribute data generated by the various participants in the consortium. The Informatics Core will continue to be responsible for working with the other consortium participants to define data dictionaries to be used in standardizing data collection, enabling the transfer of data to and from the CIFASD Central Repository, consulting on how to establish local data management systems, providing both software tools and consulting to consortium participants, and producing reports about the accumulation of data in the CIFASD Central Repository.
The Informatics Core draws on a wealth of resources, experience, and expertise at Indiana University in information technology infrastructure and data management, The CIFASD Central Repository will continue to be maintained on Indiana University's state-of-the-art central high-performance computing facilities and extended to make use of national cyberinfrastructure, taking advantage of both Indiana University's strong commitment to institutional computing resources and to Indiana University's participation in and contribution to national Grid computing projects. Resources that will be used to support the CIFASD Central Repository include supercomputers, an array of readily available database and statistical software, and a high-speed, secure, robust data archiving system capable of storing duplicate copies in multiple physical locations separated by more than fifty miles.
The Informatics Core will use these extraordinary computational resources to provide a single, highly secure, persistent repository for consortium participants to obtain the integrated, cross-cultural data that will enable the CIFASD to meet its goals of better understanding, treating, and lessening the incidence of FASD.