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Impact

In production on 7+ platforms, the oldest of them running since 2016.

310
published releases across 11 years
3
active grants funding the platform

Deployments

DeploymentWhat it isLed byRunsLive sinceLink
Pan-Canadian Genome LibraryA federal genomic infrastructure initiative for Canadian genomic data, hosted at McGill University.McGill University · Canada
Launched 2026
Ontario Hereditary Cancer Research NetworkA provincial network linking hereditary cancer research data across Ontario institutions.OICR · Canada
Launched 2025
OICR Drug Discovery PortalOne lab's own cancer genomics portal: ~405 million records across genes, mutations and protein interactions, mined for drug targets.OICR, a single research group · Canada
Launched 2025
iMicroSeq600,000+ pathogen genomes and environmental wastewater surveillance, open access, launched as the Canadian VirusSeq Data Portal.OICR and a national consortium · Canada
Launched 2021
IHCCThe International Health Cohorts Consortium atlas: 70 cohorts, most of them a hundred thousand participants or more.International consortium · Multi-national
Launched 2020
ICGC-ARGOGenomic and clinical data for 100,000+ participants, harmonized across 27 programs in 15 countries.International consortium · Multi-national
Launched 2019
Human Cancer Models InitiativeA searchable catalogue of 275 unique cancer models with their genomic and clinical annotation.US National Cancer Institute · USA
Launched 2016
CQDGFerlab's data platform for the Centre québécois de données génomiques, built on active forks of Lectern and Arranger it upgraded and patched into 2026.Ferlab, CHU Sainte-Justine · Montréal, Canada
AGARIAfrica CDC's continent-wide pathogen genomics resource, launched November 2025 across four member states with the African Society for Laboratory Medicine and SANBI.Africa CDC · Continent-wide, Africa

Publications

  • Shiell M, Bajari R, Andric D, et al.

    Overture: an open-source genomics data platform

    GigaScience (2025) · 10.1093/gigascience/giaf038

    The platform paper: peer reviewed, open access, 38 authors. Start here.

  • Gill EE, Jia B, Murall CL, et al.

    The Canadian VirusSeq Data Portal and Duotang

    Microbial Genomics (2024) · 10.1099/mgen.0.001293

    An independent account of Canada's national SARS-CoV-2 portal, written by the team that ran it and built on Search (Arranger).

  • Nahal-Bose HK, Lichter P, Weber U, et al.

    The ICGC ARGO data dictionary

    Scientific Data (2025) · 10.1038/s41597-025-06068-4

    The dictionary standard Dictionary Manager (Lectern) serves at ICGC-ARGO.

  • Speir ML, Teh WK, Perry MD, et al.

    Making genomic data FAIR through effective Data Portals

    Scientific Data (2025) · 10.1038/s41597-025-06142-x

    A third-party review of the field that cites Overture among the data portal platforms it surveys.

  • Shiell M, Ashraf S, Luc E, et al.

    The Overture Dictionary Viewer: transforming machine-readable Lectern schemas into accessible, interactive displays for any data model

    Pending · Pending

    A component-level paper on Dictionary Manager (Lectern), under review and carrying no DOI yet.

How to cite Overture is on the documentation site, with the full author list and a citation block.

Distribution and release history

Container images

611,411

cumulative pulls of the seven components’ images on Docker Hub, led by Dictionary Manager (Lectern) at 225,229, File Manager (Song), server and client at 184,453, File Transfer (Score) at 126,086. Docker Hub is the historical registry. Current distribution is the GitHub Container Registry, which publishes no pull count but carries 441 tags for arranger-server, 139 tags for lectern, 122 tags for score-server, 102 tags for song-server, 85 tags for lyric. The figure above therefore stops growing at the point distribution moved, and understates use rather than overstating it.

Releases

310

310 published releases in total: npm packages, container images, and merged release builds where that is a component's own mechanism, counted from each one's registry rather than from git tags, which this org uses too inconsistently to total on their own, spanning 11 years of continuous release activity. All seven components are developed in the open under an OSI-approved AGPL-3.0 licence.

ComponentFirst releaseReleasesLatestContributors
File Transfer (Score)2015-07-06345.12.0 (2025-08)26
File Manager (Song)2017-06-07395.4.0 (2026-08)28
Search (Arranger)2017-12-171343.0.4 (2026-05)34
Indexing Service (Maestro)2019-05-22285.0.0 (2026-08)14
Dictionary Manager (Lectern)2019-08-15322.0.0 (2026-04)19
Portal UI (Stage)2020-10-15151.1.3 (2022-03)11
Tabular Submission (Lyric)2024-06-14280.19.0 (2026-07)8