CEDAR and HeartBD2K centers jointly awarded BD2K interoperability pilot to develop the smartAPI

November 2, 2015

The smartAPI is a BD2K interoperability pilot to ease the burden of authoring good metadata for web-based Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that they become easier to discover and reuse. This 1-year pilot project will examine ways to generate smarter (machine-actionable) descriptions of APIs with intelligent, ontology-aware metadata authoring tools. In providing superior annotation for biomedically relevant web services, API developers will be able to assess whether their services easily plug into others like lego blocks, while researchers will be able to more easily compose discovery workflows consisting of interconnected web APIs.

The work will include:

  • Defining a smartAPI metadata template;
  • Building a content profiler plugin to assist in the generation of Linked Data;
  • Building a web application for the intelligent annotation of smart APIs; 
  • Indexing and making smart APIs available via high performance query system;
  • Developing a web app to show smart APIs and their connections;
  • Evaluating the API metadata curation tools on a broader set of HeartBD2K APIs; and
  • Evaluating the system's ability to find and explore cardiovascular pharmacogenomics connections.

The supplement is intended to stimulate a collaboration between the CEDAR BD2K Center at Stanford, led by Principal Investigator Mark Musen and Co-Investigator Michel Dumontier, with the Heart BD2K Center site led by Peipei Ping (UCLA), and co-led by Andrew Su and Co-Investigator Chunlei Wu at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI).

Last Updated: 
Jan 26 2016 - 11:40am