Beacon Workshop at ELIXIR AllHands

Chairs: Gary Saunders, Juha Tornroos, Michael Baudis, Dylan Spalding, Lauren Fromont, Jordi Rambla

Beacon now stands as the ‘default’ data discovery solution in GA4GH and ELIXIR portfolios, and is increasingly adopted by third-party projects. Beacons become particularly successful through their aggregation in Beacon networks, which provide a way to query many genomic variant resources through a central federation node while receiving aggregated responses all at once. Both Beacon and Beacon Network are part of the 1+MG and B1MG service catalogs and represent core discovery solutions in ELIXIR across the Federated Human Data, Rare Diseases, and human Copy Number Variation Communities.

During this workshop we will discuss:

1) progress of the fruitful collaboration with the GA4GH Beacon community 2) latest developments of the ELIXIR Beacon project including deployment tested instances in clinical and non-clinical settings (via various H2020 projects, GA4GH Driver projects and ELIXIR partners) 3) extensions to the ELIXIR Services specification in order to manage Beacon v2 instances 4) security features of Beacon v2 according to real world needs 5) an extended and improved ELIXIR Beacon Network service.

As a result this workshop will describe how Beacons that are integrated in the ELIXIR Beacon Network Infrastructure can further the contribution and implementation of GA4GH standards, and empower nodes to be part of the federated sensitive human data infrastructure.

Agenda here