BrAPI, a Standard Interface for Plant Databases

Advances in phenotyping and genotyping are resulting in the creation of vast streams of specialized data that create new opportunities for plant breeding while generating new challenges for effective data management and integration. With these developments, it becomes increasingly attractive to look for models for aggregating data across systems rather than centralizing all data in a single system. Having a standard Application Programming Interface (API) allows software to be written in such a way that the software is automatically compatible with any system that implements the API. The public plant Breeding Application Programming Interface (BrAPI) is a REST-based API to facilitate interoperability of breeding applications. The development of the BrAPI has been a collaborative, community-based initiative involving approximately 40 participants representing more than 15 institutions and companies. The development of such a standard has been recognized as critical to a number of important projects including the GOBII, CassavaBase and IBP projects and is highlighted as a foundational technology in the Excellence in Breeding initiative of the CGIAR. Version 1 of the BrAPI has been frozen since late July, 2016. The focus of version 1 has been on providing foundational services for connecting between systems and retrieving basic breeding data including germplasm, study, observation and marker data . Beyond Breeding applications, BrAPI has also found a niche in Genebank applications such as MGIS through compatibility with the Multi-Crop Passport Data standard. In 2017 we will move forward with BrAPI v2, expanding the coverage to better support data provenance, geospatial factors, remote sensing, and high-throughput phenotyping. The master version of the BrAPI is maintained on github.com: https://github.com/plantbreeding. Anyone can submit a proposed change or addition as a pull request on github. A publicly accessible, easy-to-read version of the BrAPI can be viewed on apiary.io: http://docs.brapi.apiary.io. In this presentation, a few uses cases will be presented.