The Sentinel Tool is an interactive tool used by the cancer research community to monitor changes to metadata in the Cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR). The caDSR allows the National Cancer Institute and its research partners to share information and coordinate efforts through a common data infrastructure.
The Sentinel Tool enables users to define rules known as alerts for periodic evaluation against the caDSR. When the conditions specified by an alert are met, the user receives an email message with a hyperlink to an activity report that lists the latest changes. The Sentinel Tool generates the report in HTML and stores it on the server where tool is deployed.
Users define the frequency and conditions for generating an alert. A user can create multiple alerts and distribute the alerts to any email address. The Sentinel Tool includes an optimized distribution feature that collects all report information for a user in a single email.
In the past curators manually reviewed all metadata changes, a time-consuming and laborious task. Now curators can define alerts to monitor their metadata as well as any metadata designated for use in their context. Activity reports with real-time information are available daily, weekly, monthly, or on demand, allowing curators to focus on other tasks. In addition to productivity gains, curators experience improved communications as activity reports promote discussion and review of the metadata changes occurring in various contexts.
The National Cancer Institute selected ScenPro to analyze, design, implement, and maintain the Sentinel Tool based on our expertise in the medical domain and our innovative technical approach. The Scenario-based Engineering Process guided the system development effort and ensured that the final product met both the documented requirements and user needs.