GA4GH, DNAstack

Global Alliance for Genomics & Health

The GA4GH is a worldwide organization that defines standards for responsible sharing of genomics and health data, guided by some of the biggest precision medicine initiatives in the world.

Learn more at ga4gh.org

Sharing is curing

There is power in numbers. That’s especially true in genomics, where no single organization can possibly collect the volumes and diversity of data to resolve the complex causes of disorders like cancer and autism. We believe that a new era of breakthrough discoveries will be enabled by collaborations, where organizations connect their collective data and insights towards a common goal of curing what would otherwise be incurable.

We believe in the major role that technology can play to support that effort, and in the need to create technical, ethical, regulatory, and security standards to facilitate widespread and responsible sharing of digitized genomics and related health data. Since its inception, we have invested in working together with the worldwide community to develop industry standards as part of the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health. Our products are built upon GA4GH standards and commitment of its members to promote a culture of sharing and collaboration for the betterment of human health.

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Discovery

Too often, life-saving datasets are siloed. Discovery standards make genomics and biomedical data more findable and analyzable without compromising privacy or security.

Beacon

Beacon is the genomics version of Go Fish. It gives researchers the ability to discover whether a data collection contains information about a specific genetic mutation, and additional metadata. Beacon is a great way to share aggregate information about genomic datasets.

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Search

A search engine for biomedical data. Search empowers researchers to ask sophisticated discovery or analytical questions across distributed networks of different biomedical data types (e.g. genomics, clinical) and storage systems (e.g. EHR, cloud storage).

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Service Info

Service Info is a technical handshake. It allows systems to discover basic information about a software service, like what kind of service it is, what version it implements, and who owns it. Service Info is valuable feature for building networks of software systems.

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Service Registry

Service Registry captures the member list in a software network. It makes it easy to create and manage data sharing networks, where membership can be controlled in private networks or free to join to allow for public networks.

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Access

Accessing biomedical data is usually a long and manual process. Access standards make it easier and faster for researchers to find and use datasets by using software to help make access decisions based on researcher credentials and digital consent terms.

Passport

Passport is a digital identity for scientists. It includes credentials about a researcher, called Visas, that can be used to streamline access to controlled datasets.

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Authentication & Authorization Infrastructure

A system for making data access decisions based on researcher credentials, represented as Visas in a Passport. The Authentication & Authorization Infrastructure makes it possible to enact sophisticated access policies that can be enforced by computers.

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Data Use Ontology

The Data Use Ontology is a dictionary of terms that describe how data can be used. It makes it possible to digitally encode consent terms so that data access decisions can be made by the Authentication & Authorization Infrastructure.

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Data Science

Biology is complex, and scientists need sophisticated tools to understand it. Data Science standards make it possible to extract insights from distributed networks of genomics and biomedical data.

Workflow Execution Service

An environment for running computational pipelines. The Workflow Execution Service makes it possible for data scientists and bioinformaticians to execute custom and best practices workflows in a way that is reproducible and highly scalable.

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Workflow Description Language

A language for describing computational pipelines. The Workflow Description Language makes it possible for data scientists and bioinformaticians to define workflows that can be executed reproducibly in a large number of computational environments.

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Tool Registry Service

A library of computational pipelines that can by executed by a Workflow Execution Service. The Tool Registry Service helps data scientists and bioinformaticians store versions of best practices and custom workflows and share them with collaborators.

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Data Representation

Biomedical data lives in many places, and is represented in different ways. Data Representation stadards help organizations format data in the same way so that it can more easily be combined and used together

Data Repository Service

A representation for files. The Data Repository Service standardizes information about a file regardless of where it is physically stored, making it easier for data to be used.

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SchemaBlocks

Data models for common biological entities, like subjects and samples. SchemaBlocks provide a language for the community to define and share standardized data models, so that data can be represented in the same way across systems.

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Phenopackets

A representation of phenotypic and other clinical data about a patient. Phenopackets capture patient information in a structured machine-readable format, such as terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, which make patient data more computable and shareable.

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Products powered by standards

Our products are powered by enterprise-grade implementations of the following GA4GH standards.

Standard	Data Lake	Data Ocean	Workspaces	Passport
Discovery
Beacon
Search
Service Info
Service Registry
Access
Passport
Authentication & Authorization Infrastructure
Data Use Ontology
Data Science
Workflow Execution Service
Workflow Description Language
Tool Registry Service
Data Representation
Data Repository Service
SchemaBlocks
Phenopackets