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. 2013 Dec 15;29(24):3241-2.
doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt547. Epub 2013 Sep 23.

BioServices: a common Python package to access biological Web Services programmatically

Thomas Cokelaer  1 , Dennis Pultz, Lea M Harder, Jordi Serra-Musach, Julio Saez-Rodriguez
Affiliations

BioServices: a common Python package to access biological Web Services programmatically

Thomas Cokelaer et al. Bioinformatics. .

Abstract

Motivation: Web interfaces provide access to numerous biological databases. Many can be accessed to in a programmatic way thanks to Web Services. Building applications that combine several of them would benefit from a single framework.

Results: BioServices is a comprehensive Python framework that provides programmatic access to major bioinformatics Web Services (e.g. KEGG, UniProt, BioModels, ChEMBLdb). Wrapping additional Web Services based either on Representational State Transfer or Simple Object Access Protocol/Web Services Description Language technologies is eased by the usage of object-oriented programming.

Availability and implementation: BioServices releases and documentation are available at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bioservices under a GPL-v3 license.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Interaction between external applications and existing Web Services via BioServices. External applications can use BioServices to compose or aggregate several Web Services (see Table 1 for available services)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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