M5.31 - Review of target applications and services (molecular identification)

Submitted by Scratchpad Team on Tue, 11/01/2011 - 14:17

The molecular data identification service will use a number of 3rd part tools and services: NCBI BLAST, and the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD). This new service will provide taxon identifications of DNA sequences using the EMBL and BOLD reference databases that contain validated reference sequences of known taxa. M5.31 is a review of the APIs for these 3rd part services to ensure suitability for the implementation of the identification service integrated into the OBOE framework.

Comments

by Neil Caithness - 25/10/2013 - 13:34

BOLD no longer offers a public API

The Barcode of Life (http://www.barcodinglife.com/) now redirects to BOLD Systems (http://www.boldsystems.org/). They have an attractive UI but seem to have removed the public API. Using their system in OBOE without an API will mean screen scraping which is simple enough but brittle. So far we have not had a response from the BOLD contacts. If there is no API we recommend not proceeding as screen-scraping will not produce a sustainable service and we redirect potential users to the BOLD UI.