EOSC4Cancer’s Deliverable 2.4 explores the key functionalities of Beacon, a genomic discovery tool that allows the aggregation of worldwide genomics datasets through a shared query protocol, applied to the cancer field with examples adapted to colon cancer use cases.

The document’s principal authors are Jordi Rambla and Teresa García Lezana of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) working within Work Package 2. The document contains the script and visual material accompanying the core part of the deliverable, a demo video showing the key functionalities of Beacon applied to the cancer field, and a custom UI and adapted the backend accordingly to fulfil the needs of the cancer research community. The authors describe and show the potential of Beacon not only as a cancer data discovery tool but also as a mediator for semantic and syntactic harmonisation.