About us
Learn how GA4GH helps expand responsible genomic data use to benefit human health.
Technical Alignment Subcommittee (TASC)
The Technical Alignment Subcommittee (TASC) supports harmonisation, interoperability, and technical alignment across GA4GH products.
To support interoperability of GA4GH products, the Technical Alignment Subcommittee (TASC) provides mechanisms and recommendations to promote technical alignment across GA4GH products. TASC is formed of both GA4GH Work Stream representatives and GA4GH staff who collaborate to create appropriate solutions that may result in documented recommendations and supporting technical implementations.
While TASC functions as a central technical decision-making body, all of its decisions are informed by relevant stakeholders. The work of TASC, including all documentation and decisions, is regularly and openly communicated back to the GA4GH community for feedback both during and after the development of recommendations. TASC also helps to coordinate the activities of the Data Model and Schema Consensus (DaMaSC) group, which aims to create recommendations around data models, vocabularies and schema sharing.
Approved recommendations
Pagination guide
Pagination provides a structured approach to navigating data, making it easier to process, display, and analyse information. GA4GH supports two types of pagination: token and page based pagination.
TASC-managed registries
Service Info endpoints can be created to allow servers that are using GA4GH APIs to be used within networks. This document details how to add values to the list of Service Info type values.
Current Projects
| Number | Issue | Date Created | Date Updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 73 | [Issue]: UX improvements for the New TASC Issue form | July 18, 2025 | July 18, 2025 |
| 71 | Add process and requirements for schema URLs (closes #50) | July 18, 2025 | July 18, 2025 |
| 70 | Documentation for #16 | July 18, 2025 | July 18, 2025 |
| 68 | Create standard glossary of terms | July 17, 2025 | July 18, 2025 |
| 67 | Add geolocation information to implementations catalogued in the service registry | July 14, 2025 | July 18, 2025 |
| 66 | Interoperability points across products | July 8, 2025 | July 8, 2025 |
| 65 | Create a governance structure for TASC | July 7, 2025 | July 8, 2025 |
| 64 | Align practices in product development across work streams | June 24, 2025 | July 17, 2025 |
| 60 | #16 Subtask - transfer ownership of computed digest to TASC | April 2, 2025 | April 2, 2025 |
| 59 | #16 Subtask - create GA4GH prefixes .yaml | April 2, 2025 | April 2, 2025 |
| 58 | #16 Subtask - develop resolver service | April 2, 2025 | April 2, 2025 |
| 57 | Create a problem statement template for TASC issues | April 2, 2025 | July 11, 2025 |
| 54 | GItHub Harmonization | October 23, 2024 | June 24, 2025 |
| 50 | Establish convention for GA4GH Schema persistent URLs | March 26, 2024 | July 17, 2025 |
| 49 | Moving Standard to Maintenance Mode - Documentation | March 18, 2024 | July 17, 2025 |
| 46 | Streamlined API release policies | April 20, 2023 | April 2, 2025 |
| 45 | Broadcasting an API implementation's optional capabilities | April 20, 2023 | April 2, 2025 |
| 43 | Encourage/mandate hosting (Open)API specs at well-known location | February 14, 2023 | April 2, 2025 |
| 40 | Moving Crypt4GH into its own GitHub repo | June 1, 2022 | April 2, 2025 |
| 39 | Citing GA4GH standards | April 29, 2022 | June 24, 2025 |
| 16 | GA4GH Namespace policy | April 28, 2020 | July 18, 2025 |
| 5 | Harmonise identifier (e.g. RNAME/Contig, Sample) rules across formats and protocols | February 3, 2020 | April 2, 2025 |
| 2 | Central GA4GH Ticketing | January 13, 2020 | April 2, 2025 |
| 1 | Central Metadata Registry for approved standards | January 13, 2020 | April 2, 2025 |
Process
A project submitted to TASC will go through several steps.
- New issues: issues will enter TASC’s queue for review.
- Assessment: After submission, the TASC leadership team will review the issue to ensure that it contains the required elements, as stated below. If additional information is needed, the submitter will be notified.
- Under discussion: Once a project has been accepted by TASC leadership, it is passed to the team for discussion. In this stage, the team determines a way forward for the project.
- Solution building: The team works towards a solution to the problem.
- Open for comment: The solution is shared broadly with the GA4GH community for feedback.
- Publish: Upon reviewing and incorporating community feedback, the solution is finalised and disseminated to the GA4GH Work Streams.
Leadership
Andy Yates
EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)TASC Lead
Product lead for: refget Sequence Collections | refget Sequences
Contributors
Don't see your name? Get in touch:
- Michael Baudis
University of Zurich - Chen Chen
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) - Tom Conner
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard - Mallory Freeberg
EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) - Robert Freimuth
Mayo Clinic - Francesca Frexia
CRS4 - Alexander Kanitz
University of Basel - Jonathan Lawson
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard - John Marshall
Centre for Population Genomics - Mamana Mbiyavanga
University of Cape Town - Brian O'Connor
Sage Bionetworks - Angela Page
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard - Jimmy Payyappilly
EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) - Kathy Reinold
Independent Contributor - Neerjah Skantharajah
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) - Reggan Thomas
EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) - Jon Turner
Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI) - Alex Wagner
Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Variant Interpretation for Cancer Consortium (VICC) - Andy Yates
EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)