An Application Programming Interface (API) for Programmable Access to Animal QTLdb

The development of the Animal QTLdb has been successful in terms of its growing content and numbers of utilities, users, and citations by journal papers. The success of the Animal QTLdb is partly attributable to the web, which made it possible for many remote users to access the database simultaneously through interfaces designed to serve various pre-defined purposes. We have strived to continually develop the web interfaces by implementing new functions, query options, and online analysis tools, to assist users with hypothetical and requested types of data query. To date, we have developed more than 70 user options implemented in 20+ CGI programs. Since the development of these tools was driven partly by our motivations and partly by user demands, and they are implemented on the server side, the users’ ability to alter the ways data are queried and summarized is limited. Recently we have started to develop a programmable access (application programming interface, API) platform for users to write their own scripts to query data. This interface allows users to script their own logics and query combinations, and possibly set up a cron job to make the queries automatic. To showcase, we have implemented a half dozen API portals to accept scriptable access to the database. The advantage of this platform is that users can modify and run their scripts at any time, obtain data or data summary, and flag certain data with their own filters, directly into a tabulated or other preferred format.