Integration

We are happy to announce a major upgrade of Phenome One, which includes a complete implementation of the Breeding API (BrAPI). The Breeding API is an international standard, an open-source specification for communicating plant breeding data. It includes more than 100 new APIs, implemented as RESTful architecture style, added to PhenomeOne, allowing simple integration to external systems.

We at Phenome Networks understand that our plant breeding applications (web and mobile alike) are not the only applications within an organization. Moreover, in this digital transformation era, no application can work in a silo, i.e., separated and independent from other databases. Therefore, customers often need to develop integrations between PhenomeOne and other systems, be it ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning), LIMS (Lab Information Management System), CRM (Customer Relations System), or other internally developed apps that need to interact with PhenomeOne. Integration between web systems is made possible through APIs (Application Programming Interface), i.e., commands that external systems can execute programmatically to send or receive data. PhenomeOne, as a web system, already includes an extensive list of APIs, but initially, they were developed for the application’s internal purposes and were not intended for integration purposes. For this reason, we have implemented the BrAPI.
BrAPI specifies a standard interface for plant phenotype/genotype databases to serve their data to crop breeding applications. This specification is community-driven, free, and open source.

These are some of the BRAPI advantages:

• Modularity: BrAPI covers various types of plant breeding data, like germplasm management, field trials, and genotyping..
• Compatible standard: BrAPI is consistent with several community standards, including MCPD, MIAPPE, GA4GH Variants Schema, GeoJSON, and the Crop Ontology. BrAPI can be used with all modern programming languages.
• Optimized for speed: Much effort has been invested in making BrAPI an efficient data model without compromising on flexibility.
• Community-driven: BrAPI was developed by a community of researchers and computer scientists from various research institutions.
• Flexible search: multiple search parameters allow users to find the exact data they want. No need to download monumental data and clean it manually anymore.

This new implementation of BrAPI within PhenomeOne allows customers to easily extract their data from PhenomeOne to external systems, or vice versa, retrieve data from external systems (such as various phenotyping platforms) to PhenomeOne. This is the first step to making more of your data and transforming it into knowledge.