One of the major problems in bioinformatics is that people spend too much time formatting and then re-formatting their data to use different resources, blogs Deepak Singh. Unfortunately, he says, the interfaces of data repositories in the life sciences do not use application programming interfaces, or APIs. If they did, then better visualization and other services could be provided to the users, he says, making their experience more efficient and effective. More time, then, could be spent on data analysis and software development rather than all the data formatting.