Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA.
BMC Bioinformatics. 2018 Feb 1;19(1):30. doi: 10.1186/s12859-018-2041-5.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are now widely used to distribute biological data. And many popular biological APIs developed by many different research teams have adopted Javascript Object Notation (JSON) as their primary data format. While usage of a common data format offers significant advantages, that alone is not sufficient for rich integrative queries across APIs.
Here, we have implemented JSON for Linking Data (JSON-LD) technology on the BioThings APIs that we have developed, MyGene.info , MyVariant.info and MyChem.info . JSON-LD provides a standard way to add semantic context to the existing JSON data structure, for the purpose of enhancing the interoperability between APIs. We demonstrated several use cases that were facilitated by semantic annotations using JSON-LD, including simpler and more precise query capabilities as well as API cross-linking.
We believe that this pattern offers a generalizable solution for interoperability of APIs in the life sciences.
应用程序编程接口（APIs）现在被广泛用于分发生物数据。许多由不同研究团队开发的流行生物 API 采用 JavaScript 对象表示法（JSON）作为其主要数据格式。虽然使用通用数据格式具有显著优势，但这对于跨 API 进行丰富的综合查询来说还不够。
在这里，我们在我们开发的 BioThings APIs（MyGene.info、MyVariant.info 和 MyChem.info）上实现了 JSON for Linking Data (JSON-LD) 技术。JSON-LD 为现有 JSON 数据结构添加语义上下文提供了一种标准方法，目的是增强 API 之间的互操作性。我们展示了几个使用 JSON-LD 进行语义注释的用例，包括更简单、更精确的查询功能以及 API 交叉链接。
我们相信这种模式为生命科学中的 API 互操作性提供了一种可推广的解决方案。
