Continuing on the theory covered in this course, this part will talk about application programming interfaces (APIs) and web services.

Never underestimate the power of lack of coding standards in code obfuscation. Just try randomly to read code you wrote a year ago or four years ago. You’ll be surprised with what you find. Coding standards are like the grammar in writing: they ensure that our message gets understood.

No course, with some good theory. In this six-day course, I plan to cover this computing theory.

One key feature of programming languages is the following: first, there is linearity. This is an important point that is not always clear to students who just start to program. In fact, ask yourself what the algorithm is for counting the chairs in the room where you are now sitting. Could a computer do that in the same way? How should your algorithm change? A key point is, is that the program is run step by step, in a linear way.

Now that we have the communication working with the Open PHACTS LDA, it is time to make a nice GUI.

Now that I have wrote out the goals, what they students will practically do, and how to get started with the Open PHACTS platform, I will list how we will assess the students:

The purpose of a web service is that you give it a question or task, and that it returns an answer. For example, we can ask the Open PHACTS platform what compounds it knows with aspirin in the name. We pass the question (with the API key) and get a list of matching compounds. Now, this communication is complex: it happens at many levels, which are spelled out in the Internet Model.

I have outlined the scope of the six-day course: the students will learn to program while hacking on the Open PHACTS’ Linked Data API (LDA). The first step is to get an account for the LDA. I have already done that to save time. But these are the steps to take.

Our department will soon start the course Programming in the Life Sciences for a group of some 10 students from the Maastricht Science Programme. This is the first time we give this course, and over the next weeks I will be blogging about this course. First, some information.

Update : Mark wrote up a blog post on the RDF that the ChEMBL team itself. Yesterday, the paper “The ChEMBL database as linked open data” (doi:10.1186/1758-2946-5-23) by Andra Waagmeester (@andrawaag), Ola Spjuth (@ola_spjuth), Peter Ansell (@p_ansell), Antony Williams (@chemconnector), Valery Tkachenko, Janna Hastings, Bin Chen (@binchenindiana), David J Wild (@davidjohnwild), and me appeared in the OA JChemInf journal.

Spjuth, O.; Carlsson, L.; Alvarsson, J.; Georgiev, V.; Willighagen, E.; Eklund, M. Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry 2012, 12, 1980-1986. Yeah, that looks like what I asked for :) Thanx, and well done!