The 142nd MPEG meeting will take place in Antalya (Turkey) from the 24th – 28th of April 2023.

The purpose of this face-to-face meeting is to foster collaborations between members and across working groups in order to accelerate the standardization process. Furthermore, challenging technical problems are more efficiently solved at face-to-face meetings.

For further information on the venue and registration, click here.

For ISO members, you can register here for the meeting.

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The 139th MPEG meeting was held online from July 18th to 22nd 2022. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

During the Meeting MPEG published standard documents for MPEG-G including Proposed Solutions to support ISO 23494 Biotechnology – Provenance Information Model for Biological Material and Data related to the part 3 of the MPEG-G standard for Metadata and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

A summary of the main achievements from the MPEG meeting can be found here.

137. MPEG virtual meeting

The 137th MPEG meeting was held digitally from January 17th to 21st 2022. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

MPEG Genomic Coding evaluated Responses on New Advanced Genomics Features and Technologies

The extensive usage of high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies enables new approaches to healthcare known as “precision medicine” as well as many other emerging applications such as monitoring the evolution of outbreaks and pathogen surveillance in agriculture and the food industry. DNA sequencing technologies produce extremely large amounts of heterogeneous data including raw sequence reads, analysis results, annotations, and associated metadata which are stored in different repositories worldwide and the use of the data needs to be enabled by standardized and interoperable formats. Structuring and high-performance compression of such genomic data is required to reduce the storage size, increase the transmission speed, and improve the browsing and searching performance of these large data sets as required by a wide variety of applications and use cases. The current MPEG-G standard series (ISO/IEC 23092) addresses the representation, indexing, compression, and transport of genome sequencing data with support for annotation data and searching capability. The ISO/IEC 23092 (MPEG-G) standard series provides a file and transport format, compression technology, metadata specifications, protection support, and standard APIs for the access of genomic data and annotation data in a native compressed format.

At the 134th MPEG meeting, MPEG Genomic Coding (WG 06) had previously issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) to collect submissions of new technologies improving the current compression, transport and indexing capabilities of the ISO/IEC 23092 standard series.

Now at the 137th MPEG meeting, MPEG Genomic Coding (WG 08) evaluated submitted responses to the CfP, addressing the representation and usage of graph genome references and supporting interfaces with existing standards for the interchange of clinical data. The initial evaluation results show that the incorporation of native representations of graph genome references into the MPEG-G standard is desirable and will provide new, advanced, and efficient representation capabilities for extended support of use cases of genomic sequencing data. Concerning the support of interfaces with existing standards for the interchange of clinical data (HL7 and FHIR) the response received shows that such an extension is desirable for the efficient integration of MPEG-G data into clinical workflows and shows a standardization path to achieve such integration.

A summary of the main achievements from the MPEG meeting can be found here.

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MPEG Meeting

The 135th MPEG meeting was held online from July 12th until 16th, 2021. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

The current MPEG-G standard series (ISO/IEC 23092) addresses the representation, compression, and transport of genome sequencing data to support annotation data under development. Across the genomics workflow, currently existing genomics data representation methods do not support privacy and security at the data level.

In contrast, MPEG-G will support application requirements that include those driven by privacy and security regulations. This white paper provides a survey of the regulations of genomic information in different countries, demands of security and privacy, and technological tools for further standard development.

The white paper for MPEG-G and its application of regulation & privacy can be found here.

A summary of the main achievements from the MPEG meeting can be found here.

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MPEG meeting

In April 2021, from the 26th until the 30th, the 134th MPEG meeting was held digitally regarding the COVID-19 situation. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

MPEG announced a Call for Proposals on New Advanced Genomics Features and Technologies

The extensive usage of high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies enables a new approach to healthcare known as “precision medicine”. DNA sequencing technologies produce extremely large amounts of raw data which are stored in different repositories worldwide. One challenge is to efficiently handle the increasing flood of sequencing data. Another challenge is the ability to process such a deluge of data to 1) increase the scientific knowledge of genome sequence information and 2) search genome databases for diagnosis and therapy purposes. High-performance compression of genomic data is required to reduce the storage size and increase transmission speed of large data sets.

The current MPEG-G standard series (ISO/IEC 23092) addresses the representation, compression, and transport of genome sequencing data with support for annotation data under development. They provide a file and transport format, compression technology, metadata specifications, protection support, and standard APIs for the access of genomic data in the native compressed format.

In line with the traditional MPEG practice of continuous improvement of the quality and performance of its standards, after having assessed the evidence of the availability of new technology at its 134th meeting, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposals (CfP). This CfP aims to collect submissions of new technologies that can (i) provide improvements to the current compression, transport and indexing capabilities of the ISO/IEC 23092 standards suite, particularly applied to data consisting of very long reads generated by 3rd generation sequencing devices, (ii) provide the support for representation and usage of graph genome references, (iii) include coding modes relying on machine learning processes, satisfying data access modalities required by machine learning and providing higher compression, and (iv) support of interfaces with existing standards for the interchange of clinical data.

Companies and organizations are invited to submit proposals in response to this call. Parties do not need to be MPEG members to respond. Responses should be submitted by January 10th, 2022 and will be evaluated during the 137th MPEG meeting in January. Detailed information, including instructions on how to respond to the call for proposals, the requirements that must be considered, the test data to be used, and the submission and evaluation procedures for proponents are available at http://www.mpeg.org/, submenu Emerging Technologies. For further information about the call, please contact Dr. Igor Curcio, WG 02 MPEG Technical Requirements Convenor, at igor.curcio@nokia.com and Dr. Marco Mattavelli, WG 08 MPEG Genomic Coding Convenor, at marco.mattavelli@epfl.ch.

Documents from the MPEG meeting concerning MPEG-G:

The Joint Call for Proposals on new advanced features and new technologies for MPEG-G can be found here.

The Requirements for the Joint Call for Proposals on New Advanced Features and New Technologies for MPEG-G be found here.

The Evaluation Procedure for the Joint Call for Proposals on New Advanced Features and New Technologies for MPEG-G be found here.

A summary of the main achievements from the MPEG meeting can be found here.

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