BrAPI: a standard API specification for plant breeding data

<p>Modern plant breeding research requires a large amount of data to function effectively. Data repositories are improving in their ability to store this data, but there is a growing need for interoperability between disparate data sources and applications. The Breeding Application Programming Interface (BrAPI) project offers a solution to this problem with a standardized RESTful web service API specification. This specification provides a standard data model for the plant breeding domain, plus a well-defined set of methods for interacting with the data. The goal of the project is to promote interoperability, data sharing, and open source code sharing across organizations who produce and consume data in this domain. The BrAPI project is a community built project and that community is well established and continuously growing. The standard is built based on concrete use cases to solve real interoperability challenges faced by the community. Beyond the core standard, the community has built a variety of open source tools and resources to help build and test implementations of the specification. The community is also constantly producing new BrAPI compliant applications, analysis tools, and visualizations that will work with any BrAPI data source.</p>