Figure 9

Using the TFe web API. Adventures in bioinformatics often involve large amounts of data retrieval and computation not amenable to manual labor. Thus, in place of humans, software is written to automate the grunt work, which may include computing vast quantities of data or obtaining large amounts of information from resources in the cloud, such as NCBI. To give researchers the option to retrieve data from TFe in an automated fashion, we have implemented a simple yet powerful web API. This figure provides a summary of what a data transaction may look like when using the TFe web API. In this case, the goal of the data retrieval exercise is to obtain all MeSH disease terms associated with the transcription factor 'ATF3'.