Data Via Web Services
The idea of NIF is that while scientific databases do have a plethora of interfaces, some quite complex, there should be a uniform way of looking at them and searching though them. This uniform search idea has been extended to services so that developers can take advantage of the work done at NIF to enhance their own applications by gaining access to all of the data available through the NIF interface.
When data is made public via NIF, it also becomes immediately available via web services. These RESTful web services can be thought of as programming functions that can be built into other applications. Currently, the data can be queried and pulled as an XML feed and several other sites are now pulling NIF data via services, including DOMEO and Eagle i. Developers can learn how to access data by viewing the WADL file available at http://neuinfo.org/developers
Below are some public RESTful services that can be accessed by students or used in building applications:
- Annotate any text by using this url:
The url contains the text you want to annotate, the input, which is "The cerebellum is a wonderful thing". To change this you can try to use any other text. The output from the service will return the sentence with a SPAN tag denoting that it recognized the term cerebellum and it is a type of anatomical_structure. The terms that are not recognized are returned without span tags. Note, the longestOnly=true parameter is optional it means that only the longest set of terms will be recognized an in this example it makes no difference, but in terms like hippocampal neuron it will only return one response.
Developers can use the span tags to bring back information about the recognized term because the identifier is unique and linked to definitions, synonyms, other brain regions and in some cases images: For a human readable version see
* http://neurolex.org/wiki/Birnlex_1489For a machine readable version see
* http://nif-services.neuinfo.org/ontoquest/concepts/Birnlex_1489?get_super=true- Retrieve neuroscience auto-complete suggestions, e.g.,
The above example shows the term completion for "hippocampu", but you can try to type on the url any other set of letters. The return of the service is a set of terms that matches this string including: Hippocampus and many hippocampal cells.
- Retrieve the registry items that match a search term:
The NIF Registry is a data source and this service will return all items in the registry that match the particular search term. In this case the term is miame, as in the miame standard. To use this data retrieving function you can type query terms into the end of this url in addition to or instead of the term miame. This will work the same way as typing your terms into the search box here:
* https://neuinfo.org/mynif/search.php?q=hippocampus&t=registryNote, make sure to check the terms and conditions for any source of data, terms and conditions are available as a courtesy in NIF, but you may also check with the individual sources that you wish to incorporate in your applications, all of the above described data is owned by NIF and is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so it can be freely distributed and shared.
Read more about this topic: Neuroscience Information Framework
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