FAIR-Biomed: A browser extension for accessing open data in the biomedical domain
Biomedical databases and web portals hold vast amounts of data that are intended to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. However, in reality individual websites cannot be expected to contain all the data relevant to a topic. Information is typically distributed across many specialised, domain-specific databases. Thus, in practice, researchers must gather material from multiple sources in a manual, time-consuming process.We present a modular browser extension - FAIR-biomed - that takes a decentralised approach in order to connect researchers to resources in the biomedical domain. FAIR-biomed displays snippets of information on demand and provides shortcuts to original content from an array of sources. In contrast to previous implementations in this area, FAIR-biomed interacts directly with original sources and thus always provides the most up-to-date information.FAIR-biomed is open source and currently connects to more than 20 resources to provide information on genes, proteins, publications, genetic variants, ontologies, chemical compounds, and diseases. It has a modular architecture so that it can be extended further to interface with any resource in the biomedical domain.
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