As part of the ongoing European Platform for Neurodegenerative Diseases (EPND) project, BMD Software has contributed to the development of a Beacon V2 implementation for our proof-of-concept EPND Silver Node (EPND SN) website.
EPND SN is based on the open-source Montra framework, developed and maintained by the Aveiro university’s bioinformatics group. This medical data cataloging solution had its features extended in order to implement a Beacon V2 REST API as specified by the GA4GH API standard.
The BeaconV2 API specifies two groups of endpoints, “query” and “informational” endpoints, that external services can use to retrieve information regarding what this BeaconV2 instance provides, in terms of data, and to perform queries on the relevant information.
The use of BeaconV2 enables data scientists to have a standardized approach to retrieve data from one or many private entities. Scientists will get a clear list of data “models”, how these are structured, and understand how they can perform queries on said data models, and how the data will be represented in responses.
By implementing a BeaconV2 REST API, the EPND Catalogue can provide information regarding existing datasets from onboarded data cohorts, and allow methods to retrieve the data programmatically.
This is one of several contributions to the EPND project for designing and developing of a more interconnected, federated web of data cohorts, providing their crucial neurodegenerative disease data in an easier, standardized way.
Further reading regarding the BeaconV2 project can be found on their official website: https://beacon-project.io/
If you would like to learn more about the EPND project, feel free to access the EPND organization website: https://epnd.org/