Feature request - web service

[dosumis]

A brain based web service for EL queries would be extremely useful, especially if we can come up with a nice clean RESTful implementation. Returning IDs/URIs would be sufficient, but returning rdf-xml for terms would be even better.

Happy to help out in any way if you are interested in implementing this.

[loopasam]

I use Brain in a similar setting on the top of the play! framework (http://www.playframework.org/). I return the list of results as JSONs and XML at the moment, with the following structure (defined by me):

JSON:

{
"query": "part-of some ID_01",
"subClasses": [
{"Class": "ID_02"},
{"Class": "ID_03"}
]
}

XML:

"part-of some ID_01" "ID_02" "ID_03"

I don't rely on Brain for the export to XML/JSON but it is possible to implement some methods taking a list of results (strings) and outputting an XML/RDF/etc...

The problems I see:

• What would be the structure of the data?
• How to know what to put in the results? rdfs:label? rdfs:comments?

[dosumis]

This would be a great start. Obolibrary ontologies, classes and object property URIs already resolve to RDF-XML when accessed programatically.

e.g. compare this resolved by browser to by curl or wget:
http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/FBbt_00067353

The problem with this is that the redirections involved make it a bit slow, which is why I was wondering about generating RDF-XML output directly. But thinking about it some more, this may be too specific a task for Brain.

So, perhaps all I need to do is set up a server with your existing play framework. We have some use cases for which this would already be useful.

[loopasam]

OK, it's cool indeed for the content resolution of Obolibraries, I didn't know about it. You should be able to do something similar with any framework I think. I'll write a section on the wiki on how to set this as example.