BasaniPlatform
Eight layers. One system.
Each layer has its own requirements, its own risks and its own failure modes. This page sets out the breakdown and where each part stands.
Breakdown
The Eight Layers
Participant consent and registry
Consent capture designed for multilingual and low-literacy contexts, consent versioning, withdrawal that propagates downstream, participant identity resolution and deduplication at national scale.
Biobank and sample accessioning
Sample accessioning, barcoding, chain of custody tracking from collection to sequencer, laboratory information management, cold chain and aliquot tracking.
Bioinformatics
Alignment, variant calling, joint genotyping, quality control for contamination, coverage and ancestry, annotation against population reference databases, containerised and versioned workflows.
Storage and compute
Tiered storage with integrity verification and geographic redundancy, burst compute for secondary analysis, and a residency guarantee that survives audit.
Secure research environment
Analysis in place with no raw data egress, reviewed release of derived results, data access committee workflow, and query-level audit logging.
Interoperability
Federated discovery and clinical exchange against published international standards.
Compliance and security
Nigerian data protection obligations, research ethics approvals, encryption and key management, breach response.
Operations
Monitoring, disaster recovery, capacity building, and periodic reanalysis as pipelines and reference genomes are updated.
Interoperability
Standards, in Full
A national dataset nobody can query is not a national dataset. Each standard below is listed with what it does and why it is in the architecture. This section is written for a technical reader and is not simplified.
Genomics
- Beacon v2
- Federated discovery. Lets an external researcher ask whether a variant or phenotype exists in the repository without receiving any record.
- Phenopackets (ISO 4454)
- Standard format for exchanging phenotypic and clinical descriptions of an individual or biosample. The first GA4GH standard published by ISO.
- Data Use Ontology
- Encodes the conditions attached to a dataset in machine-readable form, so consent restrictions are enforced by the system rather than remembered by a reviewer.
- Passports and AAI
- Carry researcher authorisation across institutional boundaries, so an approved researcher is recognised without a bilateral agreement for every pair of institutions.
- htsget
- Streams alignment and variant data over a standard API with range requests, so a researcher retrieves a single gene rather than a whole genome file.
- Data Repository Service
- A standard way to resolve and retrieve data objects across systems.
- Crypt4GH
- Encryption of genomic files at rest, in a format the wider ecosystem can read.
- refget
- Unambiguous identification of reference sequences.
- CRAM and VCF
- The working formats for alignments and variants.
Clinical
- HL7 FHIR R4
- Exchange with facility systems and national health registries.
- OMOP Common Data Model
- A shared research schema, so Nigerian cohorts can join multi-country studies without bespoke mapping at every boundary.
Terminology
- SNOMED CT
- Clinical concepts.
- LOINC
- Laboratory results.
- ICD-11
- Diagnoses.
- Human Phenotype Ontology
- The phenotype descriptions that genomic interpretation depends on.
Security and governance
- ISO/IEC 27001
- The information security control set.
- Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023
- The statute governing sensitive personal data, including genetic data.
- NDPC General Application and Implementation Directive 2025
- The operative directive covering registration, impact assessments, breach notification, and cross-border transfer.
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