According to a recent article, “A new lightweight web service interface for accessing massive amounts of life science research data across multiple public and private domains has been developed by researchers at RIKEN, Japan’s flagship research institute. Through the powerful RIKEN Scientists’ Networking System (SciNetS), the service provides a secure, flexible and light weight interface to millions of data records and their network of semantic relationships, ushering in a new era of collaboration, analysis and information-sharing for life science research and applied innovation.”

The article continues, “The RIKEN Bioinformatics and Systems Engineering (BASE) division, Japan’s leading research institute focusing on the integration and publication of life science research data, has now developed such an interface. Referred to as Semantic-JSON, the interface accesses a “virtual laboratory cloud centre” also developed at BASE named the Scientists’ Networking System (SciNetS), which brings together, as of May 2011, a total of 192 public database projects both internal and external to RIKEN. SciNetS creates common ground for sharing life science data resources by linking these resources together in a network of semantic relationships based on standardized Semantic Web techniques.”

It goes on, “Semantic-JSON provides a flexible interface to SciNetS on the web, enabling bioinformaticians to access specific data from across the SciNetS network using the programming languages and information tools they normally use in their research. The interface does so by defining a set of simple but relevant commands for accessing and searching SciNetS data and their semantic relationships, delivering results in the widely-used JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.”

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Image: Courtesy RIKEN