- Course overview
- Search within this course
- What is publicly available data?
- Open data
- Using public data in your research
- Data sharing and submission
- Collection challenge
- Collection complete!
- Your feedback
- Get help and support
- References
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Programmatic access of data
Many users of public databases access the data through databases’ websites, however other users access data programmatically using an application programming interface or API.
Accessing data programmatically has many advantages, including:
- retrieving large amounts of data in a format that is suitable for further analysis
- automation, particularly useful for doing similar searches frequently
- embedding data access as part of a larger automated pipeline
Many data resources can be accessed using an API; information is provided on data resources’ websites on the specifics for data access.
This online tutorial provides introduction to various APIs for EMBL-EBI resources. As many data resources are covered in this tutorial, you only need to complete the sections most relevant to you.
Go to EMBL-EBI, programmatically: take a REST from manual searches.
Once you have found data you are interested in and have access to it, what will you do with it? In the next section, we will consider using publicly available data in research.