[bioontology-support] extract "description" in Bio Portal

[Eugene]

Dear Sir or Madam,
One issue is some terms are floating, meaning the term has no parent. For example, atorvastatin has no parent -- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/cgi/mesh/2011/MB_cgi.

Currently, we use the url to download -- http://rest.bioontology.org/bioportal/virtual/ontology/<onto<http://rest.bioontology.org/bioportal/virtual/ontology/%3conto>logy id>/<id>?email=example at example.org<mailto:?email=example at example.org>.

However, that URL requires the ID. But if a term has no parent, we don't know what the id of the term is without first knowing its parent ID. On the other hands, we don't know the name of the floating term. If we know, we can query by term to get the rest of info. But we don't know the name of the term.

Do you have idea how we can handle the case? We compared two MeSH versions which were all downloaded through BioPortal API, there are 5 times of size difference. In current version, atorvastatin has no parent, so all its children cannot be found.

Thanks

Eugene



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/bioontology-support/attachments/20100922/8bb5d8ec/attachment.html>