Standards, Conventions and Best Practices

This list collects some standards and recommendations with "broad overall agreement among GA4GH contributors. This is by no means exhaustive; additions and corrections are welcome!

Dates & Times

GA4GH Recommendation and Comparison to Usage Practices

GA4GH Recommendation

Date and time formats are specified as ISO8601 strings, both for time points as well as for intervals and durations. An optionally required granularity may be specified as part of the respective attributes' documentations or parameter definition (e.g. a time class).

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Genome Coordinates

GA4GH Recommendation and Comparison to Usage Practices

GA4GH Recommendation

  • We recommends the use of "0-start, half-open" (interbase) coordinate system in all systems
  • This is not a retrospective recommendation for existing standards and products
  • "1-start, fully-closed" should be used when displaying coordinates through a GUI or report
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Identifiers & CURIEs

GA4GH Recommendation

GA4GH recommends to use CURIEs as (external) identifiers.

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