As part of the NIH BD2K PIC-SURE Center of Excellence http://www.pic-sure.org the HMS Department of Biomedical informatics https://dbmi.hms.harvard.edu is developing an open-source infrastructure that will foster the incorporation of multiple heterogeneous patient level clinical, omics and environment datasets. This system embraces the idea of decentralized datasets of varying types, and the protocols used to access them while still providing a simple communication layer that can handle querying, joining, and computing on. The BD2K PIC-SURE RESTful API implementation is called Inter Resource Communication Tool (IRCT).
More informations here: http://avillach-lab.hms.harvard.edu
Learn more about PIC-SURE Try it outThe Communication Layer provides a resource agnostic Representative State Transfer (RESTful) service. Users build queries by making a series of calls to the RESTful service that can span multiple datasets and resources.
The Application Programming Interface is the core of the project. It manages the queries for data, and processing across the different resources.
The Extension provides a way of adding additional functionality to an IRCT instance. Administrators can add any number of additional features without having to make code changes.
The Resource Interface provides a way of connecting the IRCT application to different resources for querying. Included in the project are interfaces to both i2b2, i2b2/tranSMART, and the ExAC browser.