Pharo Script of the Day: Parsing Gene Ontology terms

Today a script from the Bioinformatics world, accessing an EBI REST service called QuickGO, to retrieve Gene Ontology information. For the first script I use the NeoJSON library, and return a Pharo dictionary which we can inspect interactively through the Inspector:

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(NeoJSONReader on: (ZnClient new  accept: ZnMimeType applicationJson;  url: 'http://www.ebi.ac.uk/QuickGO/services/ontology/go/terms/GO:0005623,GO:0017071,GO:0030680';  get) readStream) next at: 'results'.

You should only provide the GO identifiers delimited by commas. For the second script we just can join a Collection to build the comma delimited String. The API also includes a service to retrieve a graph image with the terms involved in the query, so we can also try retrieving a different type of information:

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| ids | ids := #('GO:0005623' 'GO:0017071' 'GO:0030680'). (ImageReadWriter formFromStream: (ZnClient new  accept: ZnMimeType imagePng;  url: 'http://www.ebi.ac.uk/QuickGO/services/ontology/go/terms/' , (ids joinUsing: ',') , '/chart';  get) readStream) asMorph openInWindow.

Previously, EBI returned XML content in oboxml format, and the following Pharo script used XML-Parser and XPath (doc) libraries to parse GO terms. I include the script for those discovering Smalltalk and wish to know how it would be using XPath:

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#('GO:0005623' 'GO:0017071' 'GO:0030680') collect: [ : goTerm |  | quickGO |  quickGO := 'http://www.ebi.ac.uk/QuickGO-Old/GTerm?id={1}&format=oboxml' format: { goTerm }.  goTerm -> (XPath   for: 'normalize-space(/obo/term/name/text())'   in: (XMLDOMParser on: (ZnEasy get: quickGO) contents) parseDocument) ].

You've got similar code in Perl and Java so you can compare:

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