


As such, libChEBI can be embedded in both on- and off-line software applications. libChEBI is reliant upon the (automated) download and regular update of flat files that are held locally. libChEBI is available in Java, Python and MATLAB versions from, and provides full programmatic access to all data held within the ChEBI database through a simple and documented API. To provide this missing functionality, libChEBI, a comprehensive API library for accessing ChEBI data, is introduced.

While ChEBI is supported by a web service for programmatic access and a number of download files, it does not have an API library to facilitate the use of ChEBI and its data in cheminformatics software. Unlike many other resources, ChEBI is fully human-curated, providing a reliable, non-redundant collection of chemical entities and related data. Furthermore, ChEBI is an ontology, and thus provides meaningful links between chemical entities. ChEBI contains a wealth of chemical data, covering over 46,500 distinct chemical entities, and related data such as chemical formula, charge, molecular mass, structure, synonyms and links to external databases. It is widely used as a source of identifiers to facilitate unambiguous reference to chemical entities within biological models, databases, ontologies and literature.
