IntroductionΒΆ

The Data Working Group of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health has defined an API to facilitate interoperable exchange of genomic data. This is the the documentation for the reference implementation of the API.

Simplicity/clarity
The main goal of this implementation is to provide an easy to understand and maintain implementation of the GA4GH API. Design choices are driven by the goal of making the code as easy to understand as possible, with performance being of secondary importance. With that being said, it should be possible to provide a functional implementation that is useful in many cases where the extremes of scale are not important.
Portability
The code is written in Python for maximum portability, and it should be possible to run on any modern computer/operating system (Windows compatibility should be possible, although this has not been tested). Our coding guidelines specify using a subset of Python 3 which is backwards compatible with Python 2 following the current best practices. The project currently does not yet support Python 3, as support for it is lacking in several packages that we depend on. However, our eventual goal is to support both Python 2 and 3.
Ease of use
The code follows the Python Packaging User Guide. Specifically, pip is used to handle python package dependencies (see below for details). This provides easy installation of the ga4gh reference code across a range of operating systems.