CBOL has set up a REST-based webservice utility on top of the biorepositories.org database to facilitate easy on-the-fly confirmation and linkages of barcode voucher institutions. The system will follow a search and fetch pattern, but only the search webservice has been implemented so far. Also, the only return format available is XML, but JSON can also be included if desired.
The Search webservice is located at http://moc.barcodeoflife.net/biorep_search.php and allows the user to search the Biorepositories database by acronym or by institution name. The two parameters allowed by this service are field and term. Field must either be "acronym" (for acronym search) or "name" (for an institution name search). Term will be the query string you are searching for.
A search by acronym is very simple, as it will only return results for records with an exact match. A search by institution name is a bit more complicated, as it employs a fuzzy matching algorithm. The top matches for each query will be returned, along with their "hit_score". The xsd schema file can be found here: search_schema.xsd
