Connecting research through shared data.
Overture is a collection of open-source software used for building platforms to store, organize and explore research data.
Hover a component above, or a platform below, to see how they connect
What you can do with Overture
Modular, flexible and reusable components, built for problems of all shapes and sizes.
Harmonize clinical and genomic data across institutions
100,000+ participants across 27 programs in 15 countries, submitted against one data model and searchable as one dataset.
Read more →
Run open pathogen surveillance at national scale
600,000+ pathogen genomes, plus environmental wastewater surveillance, released openly rather than through an access committee.
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Stand up a portal at one lab's scale
The OICR Drug Discovery Portal is a single research group's own deployment: ~405 million records across ~20,000 genes and 32 cancer types, filtered down to candidate gene lists for drug targets.
Access is internal to the group; a public release is planned.
Read more →
MockupLet researchers ask a portal questions in plain language
The Arranger MCP server turns a question into a real search query against a portal's own indexed fields, so a researcher asks for a cohort instead of building one.
In development
Read more →
What we do with Overture
Our ability to build a diverse portfolio of data platforms rests on the continuous development and maintenance of Overture. Developed at OICR and released as open source, Overture lets our engineers and teams elsewhere build systems that help researchers and consortiums across disciplines collect, organize and share their research data.
The platform is described in GigaScience (2025), peer reviewed and open access.
Open sourceFreely available, and open to contributions from the community.
ModularEach component has one responsibility and integrates with the rest.
ExtensibleExpandable and customizable to what a project actually needs.
ReusableDesigned to carry across contexts with minimal modification.
How we collaborate
Academic partnership
We collaborate on research projects and join grant proposals as a co-applicant.
What this involves →Consulting
We work alongside your team to get Overture into what you are building, and it is most useful before the architecture is set.
What this involves →Technical support
Help running the software: reviewing a deployment, working through the setup, or getting past something that is not behaving.
What this involves →
Most questions do not need any of this, our community support forum is free and public.
Getting hands on
The documentation is organized by what you are doing rather than by what we built, so each journey starts from a different question.
Getting Started
3 Steps, 2 Commands, 1 Platform
The Overture Quickstart enables a fast and frictionless setup of our data platform locally.
Download and configure Docker Desktop (28.0.0+)
Open Settings, then Resources, and set at minimum:
- CPUs
4+- Memory
8GB- Disk
10GB
Git is required. On Windows, set up WSL2 first and run everything below from a Bash terminal.
Clone the demo repository
git clone -b docs-demo/search-portal-workshop https://github.com/overture-stack/prelude.git && cd preludeRun the demo
make demo
Your portal will now be accessible from your localhost:3000.