Knowledge Beacons: Web Service Workflow for FAIR Data Harvesting of Distributed Biomedical Knowledge

As an activity within the feasibility phase of a project called “Translator” ) funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) to develop a biomedical science knowledge management platform, we designed a Representational State Transfer (REST) web services Application Programming Interface (API) specification, which we call a Knowledge Beacon. Knowledge Beacons provide a standardized basic workflow for the discovery of concepts, their relationships and associated supporting evidence from distributed online repositories of biomedical knowledge. This specification also enforces the annotation of knowledge concepts and statements to the NCATS endorsed the Biolink Model data model and semantic encoding standards (). Implementation of this API on top of diverse knowledge sources potentially enables their uniform integration behind client software which will facilitate research access and integration of biomedical knowledge.