When I run curl to call the KEGG API (e.g. curl http://rest.kegg.jp/link/pathway/{insert ID here}) on a loop of a bunch of identifiers, I often times get different results. When I run the script once, I may get the corresponding pathway ID for a certain gene that I don't get a pathway for the second time I run the script.
I'm in a bioinformatics program and asked one of my instructors about this, and he said that he's had that happen too--and he thinks it's just timeout errors from a not-always-reliable API. He says in the past he's wrote his own validation scripts to re-run API calls a few times before deciding that the data doesn't exist.
Has anyone else had similar experiences? Are there any public resources that can help validate results from a KEGG API call like this?
Thanks!
