

FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data - loopasam
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm399335.htm?source=govdelivery&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

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seanherron
Great to see this on HN! I'm one of the openFDA core team members and would
love to help people who are interested in using the public drug adverse event
API. It's good to note that we've also released all of the source code behind
the platform ([https://github.com/fda](https://github.com/fda)) and are
actively interested in having members of the community help us make
improvements.

Please do ping me if you have any questions about the API or want to learn
more! sean.herron@fda.hhs.gov

Also, here's a direct link to the API documentation:
[https://open.fda.gov/drug/event](https://open.fda.gov/drug/event)

~~~
Osiris
I'm sure a lot of people, myself included, feel that government projects would
be better and cheaper if they were developed as open source rather the the
typical proprietary solutions developed by contractors that we see today.

What's your take on government and open source projects like this one?

~~~
afarrell
The current state of federal IT contracting is so horrendous, that it is worth
trying something if it has a 50% chance of failure, but how much harder is it
to get contractors to work on a project if your contract mandates that it be
open source or Free Software?

seanherron, do you work for a contractor or are you an in-house developer for
the FDA or another federal agency?

~~~
seanherron
I'm a federal employee serving as a Presidential Innovation Fellow
([http://whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows](http://whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows))
working on open data initiatives at the FDA. We worked with a contractor to
build the platform and were happy to find they were incredibly excited about
the prospect of open source.

~~~
afarrell
Well if the site turned out well and you liked the experience of working with
them, give the contractor some love! Who are they?

~~~
mmohebbi
We're Iodine ([http://www.iodine.com](http://www.iodine.com)), a consumer
health startup based in SF. Our backgrounds are varied but many of us came
from Google, including three of us from the search team. We're big believers
in both open source and open data and we're excited to be part of openFDA!

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DrugCite
Hey guys, I'm an owner of DrugCite.com, we've talked to the FDA a few times
over the last few years while building our site (They contacted us at various
points with questions). They let us know last August they would be releasing
this site but I guess I never thought it would so close to ours. Examples: Our
Drug Page:
[http://www.drugcite.com/?q=ABILIFY](http://www.drugcite.com/?q=ABILIFY) FDA
Drug Page [http://open.fda.gov/drug/event/](http://open.fda.gov/drug/event/)

Looks like they're including some data we didn't previous have access to or
know about. Anyways, make no mistake this is huge and will be incredibly
useful for doctors and patients everywhere, this is some great data. This is
the type of data that should be investigated before you take any medication,
prescription or not. I can see some of this data becoming common label
information shortly.

~~~
droope
I am sorry I don't see any similarities between the two pages.

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ef4
If you're interested in this, you should also check out the UMLS published by
the National Institutes of Health.

[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/)

It's a very big semantic database of health terminology. Among other things,
it has a subset called RxNorm that contains all currently prescribe-able
prescription drugs.

I've been very impressed with it and I feel like not enough people have heard
of it.

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RA_Fisher
I have some history working with the Adverse Event Reporting data. The API is
nice, but it just exposes what they already offer in flat files .... stale
data. Does it seem reasonable to you that the FDA runs a year behind on this
data?

[http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInforma...](http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Surveillance/AdverseDrugEffects/ucm082193.htm)

They don't respond:
[https://twitter.com/statwonk/status/413355130461761536](https://twitter.com/statwonk/status/413355130461761536)

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gbinal
This is awesome. Adding to the list of US Federal APIs -
[http://18f.github.io/API-All-the-X/pages/status](http://18f.github.io/API-
All-the-X/pages/status)

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skram
My colleague and I have developed a search interface for web browsers at
[http://openfdasearch.herokuapp.com/](http://openfdasearch.herokuapp.com/)

Feel free to tweet at us at @SocialHealthIs, @Geek_Nurse, and/or @Skram

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danso
It's really encouraging to see that there's someone in the U.S. gov't who not
only cares about open source and the associated effects of transparency, but
has some practical experience* in it.

The openFDA website is built on Jekyll
([https://github.com/FDA/open.fda.gov](https://github.com/FDA/open.fda.gov))
and its API is powered with Python and Node.js
([https://github.com/FDA/openfda](https://github.com/FDA/openfda))...It's not
just the framework/current-tooling that is nice, but that such systems use
open, readable formats (such as Markdown for the web pages).

The current administration has always paid lip-service toward open-
source...they won't satisfy people who think "open source" and "government"
means hand over just about everything...but they're doing a good job making
inroads on the parts of the U.S. data interfaces that were well-intended, but
so obfuscated by poor design that it was a job in itself to parse/scrape their
sites.

(FDA has always had really exhaustive dumps of their data...strewn about their
legacy site...the API isn't as interesting to me as the documentation for the
API and the pipeline of data)

* I don't want to just slag on Drupal...but Drupal was what Obama's head tech officer wanted in place, and to their credit, they did open-source parts of their custom Drupal modules...which were not particularly useful, because of the particulars of Drupal's module system and its quickly changing API...nevermind being only useful for other Drupal installations. But a lot of credit has to go to the U.S. gov't for pivoting off of Drupal to a mix of WordPress, Jekyll, and even node.js sites with less coupled components. It's been only about two or so years since Data.gov open-sourced its Drupal components before promptly switching to WordPress and CKAN modules...considering how a non-significant number of the fed sites are built on 12+ year-old code...the turnaround in the U.S. gov's stack is pretty amazing...(when it's not attempted on a service-critical site, such as healthcare.gov)

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bello
Awesome initiative! As I was testing it, I noticed that the response consists
of prettified JSON. I'm guessing that all that whitespace can be removed to
save bandwidth?

~~~
mmohebbi
Thanks!

We support gzip on the api json response for clients that support it. Given
that, I'd expect the size improvements would be minimal for whitespace
stripping but let us know if you have evidence to the contrary!

~~~
bello
Good point! I always blindly assumed that removing whitespaces would lead to a
decent size improvement, even after gzipping, so I ran a small test (gzip on
linux, default parameters):

[http://i.imgur.com/U1O4Xg5.png](http://i.imgur.com/U1O4Xg5.png)

The raw json contains the whitespaces, while they were removed in the minified
json. So there is a 47% improvement for the uncompressed version, and a 21%
improvement for the compressed version.

What would be interesting to see is how the second (compressed) number scales
with the filesize (I don't know enough about compression algorithms to guess
that).

EDIT: I really don't know how to format a table in plaintext...

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lucidrains
Ok. This is actually pretty surprising and welcomed news!

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sogen
Impressed, very very useful. Thanks!

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Istof
I hope the NSA will do the same and also open their datasets... maybe someone
could catch someone who plans some "terroristic" actions before they happen...

