View the API Description

The GA4GH aims to create an easy to implement network of Genomics data services. To achieve this end, the protocol presents some message, endpoints, and methods that are dedicated to communicating about a service's status when establishing peers.

Genomic data is not passed over the Network methods. Network participation is not mandatory, although it is encouraged.

Two servers, if they are able to communicate over a network connection, can form a simple ad-hoc peer-to-peer (P2P) relationship by notifying each other of their existence. A network can be formed by allowing services to share their list of peers with each other.

• Alice would like to join an existing P2P network by announcing to a known peer. By sending an announce request with the URL of her service to the URL of the known good peer, she has advertised her services.
• Alice would like to create an ad-hoc peer-to-peer network with Bob. She first announces her service to Bob and then adds Bob’s service to her list of peers.
• Alice would like to get a list of all the available datasets on a GA4GH network. She first requests the dataset from a known member of the network. She then requests that service’s list of peers. She then requests the list of datasets from each peer in the peer list. By recursively following peer lists she can list all the datasets on the network.
• Alice would like to advertise the protocol version her service presents. This is done by exposing an endpoint where a client can request the protocol version and other information about her service.

Ad-hoc private networks can be established between peers, as well as hub and spoke models.

Institutions may choose to take advantage of the Peer Service to tier services. This is done by presenting a service to the public on the GA4GH network that performs aggregations of data on underlying peers. These peers only expose their services to the aggregation service.

We are seeking client demonstrations of crawlers, authentication mechanisms, and aggregators that take advantage of these methods.