PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jiwen Xin
AU  - Cyrus Afrasiabi
AU  - Sebastien Lelong
AU  - Julee Adesara
AU  - Ginger Tsueng
AU  - Andrew I. Su
AU  - Chunlei Wu
TI  - Cross-linking BioThings APIs through JSON-LD to facilitate knowledge exploration
AID  - 10.1101/167353
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 167353
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/23/167353.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/23/167353.full
AB  - Background Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are now widely used to distribute biological data. And many popular biological APIs developed by many different research teams have adopted Javascript Object Notation (JSON) as their primary data format. While usage of a common data format offers significant advantages, that alone is not sufficient for rich integrative queries across APIs.Results Here, we have implemented JSON for Linking Data (JSON-LD) technology on the BioThings APIs that we have developed, MyGene.info, MyVariant.info and MyChem.info. JSON-LD provides a standard way to add semantic context to the existing JSON data structure, for the purpose of enhancing the interoperability between APIs. We demonstrated several use cases that were facilitated by semantic annotations using JSON-LD, including simpler and more precise query capabilities as well as API cross-linking.Conclusions We believe that this pattern offers a generalizable solution for interoperability of APIs in the life sciences.APIApplication Programming InterfacesJSONJavascript Object NotationRDFResource Description FrameworkURIUniversal Resource IdentifierJSON-LDJSON for Linked Data