Ontology Data Service API

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Revision as of 17:48, 15 November 2006 by Hilmar (talk | contribs) (Data exchange formats)

Goal and motivation

A common API implemented by ontology data services enables clients such as EQ editors that heavily rely on such a service to plug into different data providers, local or remote, at their choice.

Service definitions

  1. Ontology listing lookup
    • Function: lookup the ontologies being served by the data service
    • Input: none, or a particular name, and/or the name of the ontology category
    • Output: a record of name, version, identifier, meta-data (e.g., retired? in production? purpose?) for each ontology being served
  2. Look up term
    • Function: Obtain the full term information for a given ID
    • Input: a term ID, or the combination of a term name and ontology ID
    • Output: the matching term in OBO or RDF/OWL format
    • Notes: do we need neighborhood here too (e.g., with IDs only); OBO only has parents, not children.
  3. Completion list
    • Function: Obtain matching term names for a partial term name string
    • Input: partial term name string, a list of ontology IDs, search parameters (search names only or synonyms only or both, search obsoletes or not, search definition or not)
    • Output: matches as records of term name, term ID, ontology ID, synonym that was hit, how the term was hit (name, synonym, or definition)
  4. Neighborhood graph
    • Function: Obtain parents, children, descendants, or ancestors for a given term
    • Input: term ID, list of relationships to include or exclude, number of levels (path length) up and down to include
    • Output: list of terms in OBO or RDF format
    • Note: Is it sensible to return a graph as OBO format? Do we need to mandate the semantics of matching mixed-type paths (e.g., is-a and part-of)?
  5. Downloading ontology
    • Function: Obtain all terms and relationships comprising an ontology
    • Input: ontology ID, optionally name of the slim
    • Output: the ontology as an OBO or OWL stream of text
    • Notes: do we need a parameter for specifying the desired format? do we need parameter for including obsoletes or not
  6. Login
    • Function: Given a username and secret, obtain an authentication token
    • Input:
    • Output:
  7. Save EQ statements
    • Function: Save an array of EQ statements to the data store
    • Input: a list of EQ statements on OBD-xml or pheno-xml format
    • Output: success/failure indicator
  8. Load EQ statements
    • Function: Load an array of EQ statements from the data store
    • Input: author, or list of taxa,
    • Output: matching EQ statements in pheno-xml or pheno-syntax format
    • Notes: do we need parameter of list of entities to obtain EQs for?
  9. SPARQL endpoint
    • Function: Issue SPARQL queries and obtain the results in RDF
    • Input:
    • Output:
Notes 

Query languages

  • SPARQL

Data exchange formats

  • Plain text over HTTP:
    • OBO format
    • YAML
    • JSON
  • XML over HTTP:
    • OBO-XML format
    • OBD-XML format
  • RDF over HTTP:
    • RDF/XML
    • RDF/N-triples