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FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data

fda.gov

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Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data

#21

Post by machbio »

seanherron wrote: post #5

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 ) 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…

Its a great Initiative for people working in Drug repositioning especially, thank you for working towards bringing about such a nice technological api that suits bioinformaticians like me... I have a question on why do you limit the Api calls to 60000 with a key per day, what is stopping you from setting an higher limit..

Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data

#22

Post by seanherron »

machbio wrote: post #21
seanherron wrote: post #5

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 ) 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…

Its a great Initiative for people working in Drug repositioning especially, thank you for working towards bringing about such a nice technological api that suits bioinformaticians like me... I have a question on why do you limit the Api calls to 60000 with a key per day, what is stopping you from setting an higher limit..

We set it to 120req/minute and 60,000req/day to ensure that load on the system isn't too high at launch. Over the next few weeks, we'll be adjusting the limits based on the traffic patterns we see.

As noted in the documentation, if you need more than 60,000 per day, give us a ring at open@fda.hhs.gov.

Huge shout out to api.data.gov as well - all of our key authentication and analytics are powered by their open source API Umbrella platform.

Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data

#23

Post by seanherron »

palidanx wrote: post #15
seanherron wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're going to focus on product recall and product labeling data next - expect to see some more releases throughout the summer.

For product labeling, which data will be released for that?

Structured Product Labels (http://www.fda.gov/forindustry/datastandards/structuredprodu...) that will get the same cleaning and harmonizing that the drug adverse events data received.

Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data

#25

Post by mmohebbi »

bello wrote: post #24

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?

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!

Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data

#26

Post by IanCal »

seanherron wrote: post #5

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 ) 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…

I've found myself more and more depending on raw data dumps rather than APIs, so was extremely happy to see mention of this on the openFDA page. Are you currently offering this or is that still to come?

I've been doing luigi pipeline work recently, I might see if I can get yours running and get some pull requests in :)

Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data

#27

Post by droope »

DrugCite wrote: post #2

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 FDA Drug Page http://open.fda.gov/drug/event/ Looks like they're…

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

Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data

#28

Post by _ciz9 »

mmohebbi wrote: post #25
bello wrote: post #24

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?

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!

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

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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