A RESTful Interface for Toxicity Prediction

Over the past few months, I've been watching efforts around an open platform for toxicity prediction called OpenTox. From the about page:

OpenTox has been initiated as a collaborative project involving a combination of different enterprise, university and government research groups to design and build the initial OpenTox framework. Additionally numerous organizations with industry, regulatory or expert interests are being included from the start in providing guidance and direction. The goal is to expand OpenTox as a community project enabling additional expert and user participants to be involved in developments in as timely a manner as possible. To this end, our mission is to carry out developments in an open and transparent manner from the early days of the project, and to open up discussions and development to the global community at large, who may either participate in developments or provide user perspectives. Cooperation on data standards, data integration, ontologies, integration of algorithm predictions from different methods, and testing and validation all have significant collaboration opportunities and benefits for the community.

The OpenTox mailing list has been pretty active in the last few days discussing the topic of the plaform's RESTful interface and how best to represent its data exchange format.

A page discussing the OpenTox Web Services has also been set up.

I've found the community to be welcoming and genuinely open to ideas from outsiders such as myself. If you're at all involved in toxicity prediction or toxicity studies, I recommend checking out OpenTox.