Connecting People to Data
Edelweiss Connect Data APIs
Working with data and data sets can be intimidating to all types of users due to the size, complexity and seemingly incompatible nature between them. Modelling and processing tools can be quite complex. EwC Application Program Interfaces are where the magic happens.
Douglas Connect is undertaking a major effort to simplify and modernize data access to scientific data sources, with a focus toxicology. Three of the most popular toxicologic data sources are already publically available for consumption: The EPA's in-vitro ToxCast/Tox21 database, the EPA's in-vivo ToxRefDB database and the NIBIOHN's toxicogenomics Open TG-Gates database.
We have made the data accessible online via the internet in real time as a REST style API. Such APIs can easily be consumed by a wide range of workflow tools (e.g. KNIME, Garuda) and programming languages (e.g. R, Python or Javascript).
And while APIs are great, we also realize that it is often people first, not the machines, that need to understand and explore the data. For this, we are developing accompanying web based user interfaces which scientists use to quickly explore, search, compare and finally select and export the data they need. And yes, we provide means to use the selected data anywhere from Excel to piping it downstream (via APIs) to various modeling and processing tools.
So how exactly do we expose hundreds of millions of data points in such a way that allows users to quickly drill down to exactly what they need? Instead of relying on black-box search box, we heavily aggregate all the data which in turn allows us to construct dynamic user interfaces which users use to filter the data by selecting values from the calculated aggregations. And yes, we always combine this with a powerful search box as well.