GitHub https://github.com/mcupak/beacon-of-beacons

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Interested in understanding how a unified REST API affects genomic research, looking for mappings to generalized Knowledge Federation.

The Beacon project is a project to test the willingness of international sites to share genetic data in the simplest of all technical contexts. It is defined as a simple public web service that any institution can implement as a service. The service is designed merely to accept a query of the form "Do you have any genomes with an 'A' at position 100,735 on chromosome 3" (or similar data) and responds with one of "Yes" or "No." A site offering this service is called a "beacon". This open web service is designed both to be technically simple (so it is easy to implement) and to not return information that could be construed as violating anyone's privacy (so there is no good excuse for not implementing it as a public, unrestricted web resource). Within weeks of this proposal, Beacons started to crop up. The goal of the data working group is foster the development of more than a dozen independent beacons by end of 2014, and in collaboration with the other working groups to gain initial direct experience with the barriers to international genetic data sharing through this Beacon project. We call these applications "Beacons" because, like the SETI project, many dedicated people have been scanning the universe of human research for signs of willing participants in far-reaching data sharing efforts, but despite many assurances of interest, it has remained a dark and quiet place. Once your "Beacon" is shining, you can start to take the next steps to add functionality to it, and finding the other groups who may help by following their Beacons. A listing of current Beacons is maintained below.