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Comment by seanherron | Hacker News Reader

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 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

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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?

Completely agree. We built openFDA from the beginning with the mindset that everything we produce will be open source. Our hope is that users of openFDA can help us make the API more efficient, return better data (we do a lot of cleanup), and independently verify our methodology.

Beyond improving our own site, it would be absolutely fantastic if someone took openFDA and spun up their own copy. That could be another government agency using it to serve up different data, an external group mirroring openFDA in case of government shutdown or other issue, or a company that uses our code to build something innovative.

I know that sentiment is shared among a lot of agencies right now. In particular, 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov) is a new digital services delivery unit that is looking to do this at a huge scale across the federal government.

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?

I'm a federal employee serving as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (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.

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

We're Iodine (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!

The post mentions that "The FDA will continually work to identify additional public datasets to make available through openFDA" - do you guys already have an idea on what datasets are coming next?

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.

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 :)

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.

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