NASC Data And Webservices
NASC provides programmatic access to various data resources and analysis tools via Webservice technologies. Webservices enable integration and inter-operation between client and server software. The technology is built on open standards, for example, Representational state transfer (REST).Germplasm Webservices
Seed Stocks
The NASC stock catalogue holds over 800,000 accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana. This includes a wealth of characterised mutants and multiple markers; a wide variety of enhancer and promoter trap lines (both GUS and GFP), suitable for expression studies; several mapping populations and hundreds of ecotypes, which are of particular interest to post genomic research and offer a reservoir of natural genetic variation. Collections from the SALK Institute, GABI-Kat, Syngenta SAIL T-DNA, Wisc DS Lox, John Innes Centre together with the IMA (Institute for Molecular Agrobiology) lines from Singapore and similar lines from the CSHL (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) constitute a very large number of sequenced characterised insertion lines suitable for reverse genetics. Data associated with NASC stocks are available via webservices.
RESTful Webservices
REST stands for Representational State Transfer, first described by Ron Fielding, and inspired by the development of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
NASC's RESTful webservices API allows access to the NASC stock catalog and related data, via a set of URLs with a fixed pattern showed below. The query parameters are shown in curly brackets. The results of the webservices are returned in JSON format for simple consumption. NASC RESTful services will also help to meet integration requirements for large cross continental projects such as the Arabidopsis Information Portal that build systems where data can be easily combined and extended.
REST features include:
- Client-Server: clients act as interfaces to server based services
- Stateless: each request must contain all the information required to interpret the request
- Cache: response data can be marked as cacheable or non-cacheable allowing use of caching at server, client or intermediate proxies.
- Uniform Interface
- Identification of resources: unique identifiers (e.g. URLs or URIs) for specific resources
- Manipulation of resources through representations: requests and responses are representations of objects (e.g. HTML or XML documents)
These features are part of the HTTP design, thus HTTP can be considered a REST protocol and REST services are based on HTTP. Using URLs to identify resources, MIME types to identify types of data representation and using requests that contain all the state required to process the request.
The data returned by a RESTful service can be in a variety of MIME formats. NASC data is currently returned in standard JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format.
NASC RESTful webservices
The basic format of a NASC RESTful webservice is as follows:http://webservices.arabidopsis.info/api{tablename}
For example: http://webservices.arabidopsis.info/api/stock
You can invoke a REST webservice simply by using it's URI. For a simple example of how to invoke a NASC webservice, please follow this link.Below are some examples of querying the RESTful webservices:
| Service URI | Description | Using curl | Using wget |
|---|---|---|---|
| http://webservices.arabidopsis.info/api/stock | Fetch all Stocks | curl 'http://webservices.arabidopsis.info/api/stock' -H 'Content-type:application/json' | wget 'http://webservices.arabidopsis.info/api/stock' |
Contact
Please email all comments or problems to the bioinformatics team.
