After a weekend of hacking php (and with the help of the fantastic source code of BasicBot), we've finished our first database-browsing, wiki-populating, automated bot which will populate the wiki with content and expert pages for all 65,000 trials on the clinicaltrials.gov database. The bot is chugging along diligently, and we expect to have completed the population process by mid-week.
In the future, we're planning on creating a multi-threaded bot that will speed up the process tremendously, as well as limiting updates to new or revised content from clinicaltrials.gov. For now, we're just excited that we'll soon have more content than we'll know what to do with -- ready and waiting for your discussion and analysis!
On the aesthetics front, we're continuing to modify the layout of individual content pages to make it as easy as possible to navigate the plethora of data and find the information you're looking for. As always, we'd love your feedback and suggestions.
If you're curious, you can see the trials being added in real-time by the bot on the "New Pages" list.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
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