GDI releases Starter Kit
- 03 Jul 2023
Full workflow of the GDI Starter Kit user journey. The dotted circles (User Portal: Data Catalogue and User Portal: Access Management & LS AAI) are not included in the Starter Kit yet.
GHGA welcomes the recent release of the GDI Starter Kit. We are using several of the technologies provided by the Starter Kit and will ensure that functionalities developed by GHGA, such as identity management, data access, storage, and encryption, will be compatible with the GDI products. By doing so, GHGA intends to integrate its existing services with the GDI network. With the Starter Kit now being available, we will be able to further products from GDI, like the synthetic genomic and phenotypic data provided and the Beacon service for data discovery, which will be used for the development of GHGA's infrastructure.
The European Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) project has released a ‘Starter Kit’ based on the rare disease and cancer proof-of-concepts from the Beyond 1 Million Genomes (B1MG) project.
The Starter Kit is a set of software applications and components co-developed by the 20 GDI nodes, based on open community standards from the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). These have been tailored for new nodes in GDI to deploy during their onboarding phase. The Starter Kit gives all countries the technical capability to access synthetic genomic and phenotypic data across borders.
The Starter Kit includes more than 2,500 synthetic genomics and phenotypic data (including cancer, rare diseases and population genomics) and enables nodes to rapidly deploy a functioning pilot system, as a first step towards a production infrastructure. The Starter Kit is freely available to any interested parties, for example, industry can use the Starter Kit to understand what the GDI project plans to deliver and design their products accordingly.
Many of the Starter Kit products are open source software products that are operated as services in national hubs. LifeScience AAI and Beacon Network are offered as a service at the European level operations for the national hubs.
The GDI Starter Kit is a key project output that supports federated data access workflows. It will benefit not only the national nodes of GDI, but also in future public institutions and companies who can use the software technologies to increase legal, organisational, semantic and service interoperability by including these software and standards into their own environment.
“The GDI Starter Kit has generated a lot of excitement” says Serena Scollen, the GDI Project Coordinator and Head of ELIXIR Human Genomics and Translational Data team, “ as it lays the foundation for how countries can deploy infrastructure to become operational and integrated into the 1+MG infrastructure. Advances are already evident in all 20 countries. Technical developments are paramount at this stage of GDI to ensure we are on a path to provide the infrastructure to support the discovery, access, sharing and analysis of human genomics data and linked phenotypic/other data on a massive scale.”
This release is the first version of the Starter Kit, which will be further developed during the lifetime of the project following an iterative approach. The Starter Kit is accessible here:
https://github.com/GenomicDataInfrastructure
GDI starter kit authors community