biotoolsregistry (bio.tools) is the Web application of the ELIXIR Tools & Data Services Registry. It allows the curation and discovery of bioinformatics resources including databases, tools, services and so on, available under a variety of interfaces.
bio.tools provides a query interface, registration interface and API. The query interface allows a user to search the corpus of resource descriptions, display what fields of information are shown and filter and sort the results by various attributes. The registration interface allows the manual creation and editing of resource descriptions. The HTTP-based API allows query as well as automated creation and update of accessions.
bio.tools depends upon a resource description model: biotoolsSchema.
In support of discoveries in the life sciences, a plethora of databases and tools are deployed, in technically complex and diverse implementations, across a spectrum of scientific disciplines. The corpus of documentation of these resources is fragmented across the Web, with much redundancy, and has lacked a common standard of information. The outcome is that scientists must often struggle to find, understand, compare and use the best resources for the task at hand. The need - which biotoolsregistry supports - is for a comprehensive and consistent registry of information about bioinformatics resources.
bio.tools, supported by ELIXIR — the European infrastructure for biological information - is available at
https://bio.tools (production version) https://bio-tools-dev.sdu.dk (latest development version)
Please read the documentation.
bio.tools is available under open license.
The registry content is freely available to all under the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC BY 4.0.
bio.tools development is covered by the emerging governance model of the bio.tools project.
Please see the contributors page for a list of people involved with the project.
If you use bio.tools, please cite:
Ison, J. et al. (2015). Tools and data services registry: a community effort to document bioinformatics resources. Nucleic Acids Research.
doi: 10.1093/nar/gkv1116 PMID: 26538599
This article is freely available (Open Access).
