chem-bla-ics

I previously wrote about the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) which has become a de facto standard for sharing data by web services. I personally still prefer something using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) because of its clear link to ontologies, but perhaps JSON-LD combines the best of both worlds.

The Open PHACTS API support various formats and this JSON is the default format used by the ops.js library. However, the amount of information returned by the Open PHACTS cache is complex, and generally includes more than you want to use in the next step. Therefore, it is needed to extract data from the JSON document, which was not covered in the post #10 or #11.

Debugging is the process find removing a fault in your code (the etymology goes further back than the moth story, I learned today). Being able to debug is an essential programming skill, and being able to program flawlessly is not enough; the bug can be outside your own code. (...

Eating your own dog food is an rather useful concept in anything where a solution or product can change over time. This applies to science as much as programming. Even when we think things are static, they may not really be. This is often because we underestimate or are just ignorant against factors that influence the outcome. By repeatedly dogfooding, the expert will immediately recognize the effect of different influencing factors.