E-Utilities and EDirect: NCBI Entrez Programming Interface

The Entrez Utilities provide URL-based access to the search, linking, and data retrieval functions of NCBI's Entrez system. Entrez Direct is a set of Unix command-line tools that simplify construction of multi-step EUtils queries. In this talk I will introduce the use of EUtils and EDirect, and will describe the upcoming switch to accession.version sequence identifiers. I will also show examples of ad hoc queries on XML search results that are made possible by EDirect's xtract program.