Build service to query PPO ontology

[jdeck88]

Its difficult to access information contained in the PPO OWL file when accessing from clients. For example, simply getting a list of available "present" or "absent" classes the client would need to download the OWL file and then parse it....It would be useful to build a service to easily and quickly retrieve information such as a list of available "present" and "absent" classes (and other information which may be useful to discover in the ontology) and return responses in JSON. The architecture of this system would look like:

ppo.owl (released version) <- Node service (versioned) <- clients (e.g. rppo OR ppo-data-interface)

The service would look something like:

request: http://{ppo-service-url}/v1/getPresentTraits

response: [{"uri":"PPO_0002324", "label":"floral structures present"}, {...,...}, ...]

There are some useful starting points for parsing information from the ontology using node, such as: https://github.com/linkeddata/rdflib.js https://www.npmjs.com/package/hylar

[jdeck88]

OK--- this is implemented. See the ppo-data-server homepage for instructions