GA4GH Implementation Forum

Diverse scientific and clinical groups meet in the GA4GH Implementation Forum (GIF), from rare disease research teams to national initiatives stewarding thousands of human genomes. They find ways that GA4GH products can solve real-world problems.

Empowering science through interoperability

When GA4GH products work together, scientists can study more data from more places. This leads to new genomic discoveries that improve healthcare.

To support implementers around the globe, GIF runs pilot projects that demonstrate how GA4GH products can power such end-to-end solutions.

In GIF, multiple institutions tackle problems together — leading to more interoperable systems. Participants include Individual Contributors, Driver Projects, Organisational Members, and Strategic Partners. They find and fix pain points to help future adopters of GA4GH products.

GIF Projects get dedicated staff support and a sounding board of genomics leaders from the GA4GH community. By joining GIF, genomic data sharing initiatives can take advantage of this valuable network of expertise and solve their real-world challenges.

Current GIF Projects focus on:

  • federated imputation
  • federated variant matching

Three strategies

GIF Projects use three strategies to achieve interoperability. These strategies build on the 2020 Connection Demos, which simulated how a researcher can search, access, and analyse genomic data using GA4GH standards.

The “horizontal” demo showed interoperability across data providers. The “vertical” demo showed interoperability between standards. The “cross-platform” demo showed interoperability between both providers and standards. Learn more about the Connection Demos in a webinar and podcast.

What do you want to achieve with GA4GH products?

A diagram showing a "horizontal" strategy for enabling interoperability, reliably producing the same research results regardless of your choice of platform.

01
Horizontal interoperability

Reliably produce the same research results regardless of your choice of platform.

A diagram showing a "vertical" approach to enabling interoperability by integrating a suite of GA4GH standards within an institution.

02
Vertical interoperability

Integrate a comprehensive suite of GA4GH standards within your institution to answer a scientific inquiry.

A diagram showing a cross-platform approach to interoperability, enabling real-world disease research using data and services across institutions.

03
Cross-platform interoperability

Conduct real-world disease research using data and services across institutions.

Get involved

Have a use case that would make a good GIF Project?

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Implementation examples

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