Atlas Web Services Alpha

Hello!

A new build is up - 4866. No major visible changes but several important reworkings under the hood:

• Improved caching - hopefully you should notice faster responses
• Better experimental factor ontology (structured vocabulary of experimental variables) expansion - now expands down through all available levels instead of just one as before, and is on by default. Example: search for tumor.
  
• Auto-suggest drop-down works a bit more intuitively, esp. on conditions. You'll see what I mean, just start typing a query.
  

The big deal with this release is, however, the very limited, initial SOAP Web Services API to the Atlas. See http://www.ebi.ac.uk/microarray/doc/atlas/api.html for further detail on this. Among other things it's a step towards batch querying of data.

As always, your feedback is welcome! More interesting and wonderful things are in the works.

--Misha
P.S. It would be easy for us to offer expansion by lots of other ontologies. Would that be useful to users, too?