Wednesday, April 2, 2014

openFDA

It's exiciting to see how the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) now starts to make some nice buzz about their new project called openFDA:  A research project to provide open APIs, raw data downloads, documentation and examples, and a developer community for an important collection of FDA public datasets.

Excellent blog post from Dr. Taha Kass-Hout (@DrTaha_FDA), Chief Health Informatics Officer of FDA. He writes: "Our initial pilot project will cover a number of datasets from various areas within FDA, defined into three broad focus areas: Adverse Events, Product Recalls, and Product Labeling."

I do hope that the idea of not only open, but also linked data, will be part of this effort. For a quick intro to Why Linked Data? check out this nice video explaining the utility of linked data and how its being used by the UK's Ordnance Survey.


I don't have the full context to all of this, but I may think there are some excellent opportunties for Dr Kass-Hout and his team to leverage linked data intitative such as these: