BOLD Web Services

Retrieving Public Records on BOLD

Data that has been publicly released through BOLD can be retrieved manually through the BOLD public interface or automatically through BOLD web services. BOLD systems supports the informatics community by providing web services to facilitate the automatic search and retrieval of public data. There are currently two web services available through BOLD:

1. eSearch: to search the BOLD public database
2. eFetch: to retrieve records from the BOLD public database

Public data records include record identifiers, taxonomy, specimen details, collection information and sequence data. Data records that have been publicly released through BOLD can be retrieved by setting search parameters in the web services with options to download reports in some of the most common file formats (XML, TEXT, JSON).

The documentation in the BOLD Web Services Handbook provides details on BOLD Web Service functionality, architecture, and best practices as well as an explanation of the BOLD record schema.

For assistance with BOLD Web Services, please email the BOLD Support Team: support@boldsystems.org.