The National Library of Medicine will host this fall a one-day software coding event " dubbed a hackathon"that is designed to jump-start development of software applications that would make federal data related to drugs and lactation more accessible to consumers.
The coding project is being led by the NLM team that developed Pillbox, an award-winning Web application that provides images of 1,000 tablets and capsules manufactured in the United States for pill identification by pharmacists, doctors and others.
Pillbox, which has been under development since 2004, has created a standard high-resolution image that can be attached to the Food and Drug Administration's structured product label.
Now, the Pillbox team is tackling software development surrounding NLM's LactMed database, which lists drugs that breastfeeding mothers might be exposed to and the possible effects on breastfed infants.
"It's an amazing data set " broad and deep"but it is used in a specific way by specific people," said David Hale, project manager of Pillbox and a technical information specialist with NLM. "Our plan is to bring together all of the stakeholders and take several years of Pillbox development and distill it to this community."
NLM will invite a variety of interested parties to the event, including data experts, researchers from the National Institutes of Health's Office of Research on Women's Health, representatives of the La Leche League, pediatricians, breastfeeding mothers who blog and experts on Web services and application programming interfaces.
"During our one-day hackathon, we will take the LactMed system, de-construct it and re-build it with all of those stakeholders in a single room, single-day event," Hale said. "We will look at our data and ask if the structure is appropriate and what do we need to do to modify it. Then, with the API experts, we'll develop a specification for back-end services that Web designers can use. What we will end up with is a toolkit that anyone can start to leverage."
Hale says the goal of the hackathon is to build a light-weight API for LactMed. "We're not interested in perfection," he says.
Long-term, Hale is hoping the Pillbox team can help researchers across NLM make their data sets more accessible to innovators. "I'm very happy if Pillbox can be a connection between NLM and the developer community," Hale said. "I'm hoping Pillbox helps facilitate the opening of all these other data sets that are out there."
