Vincent Ferretti and his team (I was in contact with Douglas Wong, Bob Tiernay, and Dusan Andric, but others may have worked on it too!) over at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research have recently integrated bam.iobio into their really awesome data portal see it here. The data portal pulls together data from many groups that are part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC), giving a single nice interface to the data while also adding a lot of useful metrics. It's a very impressive effort and is loaded with great ways to better make sense of a large and diverse data set. I especially like the search page (image below), which gives some nice pie charts on project-level data metrics.
As a data portal, this project is faced with the challenge of working with remote data sitting in many different locations. It's really interesting to see how well iobio works with this architecture. Since iobio remotely samples data files, the ICGC data portal can analyze and visualize this remote data without any downloading or major processing, which would probably require some complex backend code. Another perk is that all samples are instantly able to be visualized as soon as a member organization uploads some data, since it's happening in real-time.
