Open phacts 101

If you're new to Open PHACTS and want to know what it's all about, this is the place to start!

Open PHACTS is a public-private partnership designed to provide access to integrated biomedical data. By connecting major databases such as ChEMBL, Uniprot, Gene Ontology, Wikipathways and many more, we allow scientists to ask complex questions of these data. For more information on the project, including key papers and presentations, please visit our main site at openphacts.org.

Open PHACTS uses semantic technologies to connect data together, and we make the system available to you through our developer friendly API. Essentially, this provides a suite of methods that you can use to interrogate the data we hold and build rich real-world applications on top. We maintain a list of [Data Sources](Data Sources) in the platform.

Get Going!

• Visit dev.openphacts.org and click "Sign Up" to obtain you application ID and keys. You'll need both to access the API
• Click on "documentation". You will then see a list of methods.
• Most methods require URIs that fully identify the compounds, proteins, diseases etc that you wish to query on. But lets say you dont know the URI for "histamine h3 receptor"
• Click the method "Map free text to a concept URL". Click in the app_id box, the system will automatically fill in your information. Now in the "q" parameter box, enter the target name above
• Click submit, you should see a list of results, lets say we want the human protein, thats listed there with its URI of "http://www.conceptwiki.org/concept/75a1b528-27d7-49b5-8320-2f153e104b39"
• Now, open the method called "Target Information" and pop this URI into the top box. Enter your app id/key and click submit and with a bit of luck you should have a chunk of information on this protein
• Explore the various methods on the page, and go create either using the api or one of the extensive Toolkits for accessing Open PHACTS