GA4GH standards employed by Gen3

GA4GH Standards

GA4GH is an international standards setting body for Genomics and Health. Gen3 aims to follow GA4GH standards whenever possible in order to improve our interoperability with other systems and to simplify the use of a Gen3 Data Commons.

Driver Projects

Gen3 technology is used by four different driver projects:

  • The Biomedical Research Hub, which as a data fabric, enables access to multiple independent data commons containing biomedical data.
  • The Data Commons Framework Services, which underpins interoperability within the Cancer Research Data Commons.
  • The NHLBI BioData Catalyst (BDC) is a cloud-based ecosystem that offers researchers data, analytic tools, applications, and workflows in secure workspaces. It is a community where researchers can find, access, share, store, and analyze heart, lung, blood, and sleep data resources.
  • The NIH Cloud Platform Interoperability (NCPI) program seeks to create a federated genomic data ecosystem and is a collaborative project between NIH and external partners comprising three working groups.

GA4GH Products Included in Gen3

Data Repository Service (DRS)

The Data Repository Service (DRS) API provides a generic interface to data repositories so data consumers, including workflow systems, can access data in a single, standard way regardless of where it is stored and how it is managed. The DRS standard is incorporated into our fence and IndexD services.

Passports and Visas

The Passports specification provides a data model for encoding information about the researcher, along with their acquired data access permissions, in a way that cannot be tampered with and enables data access between platforms. Once a platform has issued a visa to your passport you can use that passport to bring your data to yet another platform. Our Fence service supports RAS, which is an NIH implementation of Passports

Data Connect

Data Connect is a standard for discovery and search of biomedical data. It shares metadata about an identifier. The Gen3 Metadata Service (MDS) is very close to this standard and will be fully compatible soon.

Task Execution Service (TES)

The Task Execution Service (TES) API is a standardized schema and API for describing and executing batch execution tasks. Gen3 is working to incorporate this standard into our own workflow execution service.