http://www.ebi.ac.uk/cgi-bin/dbfetch?db=EMBL&id=HS231,AL035660&style=raw
Web Services at the EBI  information

     

This project aims to provide programmatic access to the various databases and retrieval and analysis services EBI provides.

Web Services is an integration technology. To ensure software from various sources work well together, this technology is built on open standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol(SOAP), a messaging protocol for transporting information; Web Services Description Language (WSDL), a standard method of describing Web Services and their capabilities.For the transport layer itself, Web Services utilise most of the commonly available network protocols, especially Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).     


The present documentation concerns:

Data retrieval.

Homology searches.

Using cgi scripts.

Web services are supposed to replace cgi scripts. Presently I find web services very difficult to use, lacking some options that cgi script offer thus less powerfull, and finally with a lack of good documentation (see more comments on WSDbfetch )
I will try to document python and cgi scripts on ncbi, ebi and ensembl in a near future.



Last updated 04/04/2007. Richard Christen