New (RESTful) interface for InterPro

In September 2012, InterPro launched a new look and feel for its website (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/).  We re-designed the pages based on feedback from our users (we did a lot of usability testing, user surveys and talking to people directly about what they wanted from our website).  We hope that, as a consequence, people have found it much easier to find the information they need and the site more enjoyable to use.


The redesigning of the website was almost entirely cosmetic and very little of the underlying codebase and database was changed before it was released.  However, immediately after launching the re-styled site, we decided to re-factor the entire web application and its back-end database. This may seem like a back-to-front way to do things but in fact, doing things that way round meant we were confident that all of the data we were delivering through our web app was utilised in some way.  Rather than using our production database schema (as in the past), instead we generated a new query-optimised warehouse, and a Spring MVC web application was built on top of that.  The new web site that we launched on March 11th is faster, less prone to failures and much easier for the team to maintain (hurrah!)

An additional happy consequence is that we've been able to produce RESTful URLs for the data in InterPro.  

For example, if you:

want to get the list of proteins matched by a particular domain (for example, the SAP domain, IPR003034), you use the URL http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/entry/IPR003034/proteins-matched.  
want to know which proteins look similar to the UniProt DNA repair protein RAD4 (P14736) you can use the URL http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/protein/P14736/similar-proteins?export=fasta to retrieve proteins with the same domain architecture in FASTA format. 
are interested in a particular species, you can filter results using the NCBI taxonomy ID (e.g. for just the mouse proteins containing a SAP domain, use http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/entry/IPR003034/proteins-matched?species=10090)


There are RESTful URLs for all of the entry and protein entity pages in InterPro.  Please take a look around the site and let us know if there are any features that you think we should add.  If you link to us already, please update to using these new URLs in your resource.

Sarah

on behalf of the InterPro team

A new blog for InterPro

So many changes have been happening at InterPro recently, we thought it was time we explained a bit of what we've been doing.  And starting a blog seemed like the perfect way to do this.

So, from time to time, we'll be using this blog to explain what new features are coming in the InterPro website and InterProScan software; to highlight some of the content of the database and to give you a heads-up when we are going to be attending conferences, or giving training courses.

Most importantly, it gives our users a chance to directly feedback what they think of these things, adding to the number of channels you can use to contact us.

Currently, we have a twitter account and a number of mailing lists.  These are listed below.

Twitter: @InterProDB

interproscan-announce@ebi.ac.uk - used to announce InterPro releases and major changes.  Subscribe to this mailing list if you want to receive these kinds of updates directly to your inbox

interhelp@ebi.ac.uk or support@ebi.ac.uk - contact us with questions, suggestions or problems with using InterPro or InterProScan

We hope that our users will find this useful!

Sarah
on behalf of the InterPro team