Our technology: REST interface
XNAT is an advanced management system for research images. It uses multiple technologies to provide researchers with the tools they need to process data and view data. The ICR has been at the forefront of developing new capabilities for XNAT, in particular, the ICR-XNAT-OHIF viewer (see Doran et al. Tomography 8.1 (2022). This section describes an important component of the technology we use to interact with XNAT and is used extensively in the viewer.
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a method of sending messages to an internet-accessible service like XNAT. With REST, we can:
access data located on a server (GET method)
transfer data to a server (PUT method)
remove data (DELETE method)
trigger other activity on a server, i.e., send a command to the server to do something (POST method)
REST is the basis for programmatic access to XNAT and toolkits like XNATpy exist to make life easy with flexible APIs and it transforms our ability to curate datasets to high standards, as exemplified in our featured research on the MALIMAR project.
For further details about using the XNAT REST interface, see the extensive documentation produced by the core XNAT development team at Flywheel and Washington University.
