- Course overview
- Search within this course
- What is publicly available data?
- Examples of publicly available databases
- Data management for publicly available data
- Licences and data reuse
- Programmatic access
- Sharing your data
- Further learning
- Your feedback
- References
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Programmatic access
Many users of public databases access the data through the databases’ websites, however other users access data programmatically using an application programming interface or API.
Accessing data programmatically has many advantages, including:
- retrieving large amounts of data in a format that is suitable for further analysis
- automation, particularly useful for doing similar searches frequently
- embedding data access as part of a larger automated pipeline
Each data resource will have its own way of accessing it programmatically; details can usually found in the help section of their website (figure 9).
 For more information on accessing data programmatically and details of accessing specific EMBL-EBI resources, try our online tutorial EMBL-EBI, programmatically: Take a REST from manual searches. |
So far in this tutorial we have thought about using publicly available data, but what if you would like to make your own data available? Continue on to the last section of this tutorial to find out.