webservices
Based on REST services using a Resource Naming convention: an understandable resource naming leading to an easily leveraged Web service API (Identification/querying of resources) and easy to implement within R. Output formats: TSV, JSON and XML. Even if the WS outputs are not dedicated to human readers (the script languages as R are the typical clients), the XML outputs can be human readable in a web browser, made possible by using a XSL transformation mechanism which converts the XML outputs to HTML format.
Figure 4: REST Services: hierarchical tree of resource naming (URL)
Figure 6: An online tool based on Swagger allows application developers to test the API and to build queries.
Figure 7: Retrieving data along with metadata within R