Jason Chin, Richard Durbin, and myself (Gene Myers) found ourselves together at a workshop meeting in Dagstuhl Germany and hammered out an initial proposal for an assembly format. We thought GFA was a good start point and built a more comprehensive design around it. We are calling this preliminary version the "Dagstuhl Assembly Format" or DAS and offer it up here for comment, criticism, and suggestions with the hope that eventually some version of it might find adoption.

The reason that we want a standard is that we find that in general, different development teams build assemblers, visualizers, and editors because of the complexity and distinct nature of the three tasks. While these tools should certainly use tailored encodings internally for efficiency, the nexus between the three efforts would benefit from a standard encoding format that would make them all interoperable.

The white paper is here