Browse and search for terminologies that can be interesting for your research.
Use information from terminologies programmatically to provide semantically enriched applications.
Retrieve and store Information from terminologies in your local information system.
Store or connect your terminologies to the TS and get access to all provided services automatically.
The Terminology Service provides access to a set of terminologies useful for biological research. Terminologies are distinguished between internal (locally hosted) and external (remotely accessed) ones. There are two possibilities to explore the terminologies:
Browse
Under Browse you can find the list of all terminologies. Browsing a terminology hierarchy enables you to understand its structure and content in order to determine if the terminology is useful for your research.
Search
Under Search you can query all terminologies for terms to determine their usefulness for your research. Clicking on a term will display its properties and its graphical representation inside the corresponding terminology.
The Terminology Service allows you to semantically enrich your applications by accessing the information provided by the Terminology Service via our API or by including the service in your User Interface. Thus, we offer two possibilities for application developers to use the Terminology Service:
API
Our API consists of a RESTful webservice for accessing all available terminologies. It has been designed based on API usability principles. The service endpoints are grouped into four categories: search services, hierarchy-oriented services, information services and metadata services.
Widgets
We offer a set of widgets that can be directly embedded in your web application. By incorporating such widgets, you enable your users to search, select and browse terms from one or more terminologies directly.
If there is a terminology you would like to provide or to use via the Terminology Service Widgets or if you have suggestions for the improvement of our service, please contact us.
The Terminology Service offers the possibility to retrieve and store parts or complete terminologies into your local information system. The advantage is that you can integrate the semantic information from the terminologies into your existing system (databases, indexes, etc.) directly. Locally hosted copies of terminologies can be extended locally or updated when new versions of the terminologies become available. We plan to provide an update service that informs Terminology Service users about terminology updates.
You can provide your own terminologies to the Terminology Service and directly benefit from the offered services and tools. Your terminology will be available via our API and will be connected to the widgets for search and visualization.
You can provide your terminologies in a variety of formats ranging from a simple list of terms, a tabular form to Semantic Web (SW) compliant formats like RDF, OWL and ontologies like SKOS. We developed a tool for transforming a list of terms or documents in a tabular form into a SW-compliant format. The files will be checked for consistency and a set of metrics will be computed. Besides the terminology, you only need to provide some additional metadata information (e.g., description, contact information).
You can also register your service at the Terminology Service and we will create a corresponding adapter to our API. The TS API calls will be redirected to your service and the service output will be mapped to the Terminology Service. By connecting your service to the Terminology Service, you increase its visibility and usability. Existing or new applications can use your terminologies in combination with existing terminologies in the TS easily. Furthermore, you can employ all available services offered by the TS.