bluesyemre

As part of its work to fuel data-driven discovery and innovation, the National Library of Medicine has launched Data Discovery, a platform to provide access to datasets from selected NLM resources. Users can explore, filter, visualize, and export data in a variety of formats, including Excel, JSON, XML, as well as access and build with these datasets via API. NLM welcomes your comments on this program, as well as suggestions for datasets to be added to the catalog, at nlm-support@nlm.nih.gov.

Did you know that each day more than four million people use NLM resources and that every hour a petabyte of data moves in or out of our computing systems?

Those mammoth numbers indicate to me how essential NLM’s array of information products and services are to scientific progress. But as we gain more experience with providing information, particularly clinical, biologic, and genetic datasets, we’re finding that how we share data is as critical as the data itself.

To fuel the insights and solutions needed to improve public health, we must ensure data flow freely to the researchers, industry innovators, patient communities, and citizen scientists who can bring new lenses to these rich repositories of knowledge.

One way we’re opening doors to our data is through an open data portal called Data Discovery. While agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are already utilizing the same platform with success, NLM is the first of NIH’s Institutes and Centers to adopt the platform. Our first datasets are already available, including content from such diverse resources as the Dietary Supplement Label Database, Pillbox, ToxMap, Disaster Lit, and HealthReach.

Why did NLM take this step? While many of our data resources have long been publicly available online, housing them within Data Discovery offers unconstrained access and delivers key benefits:

• Powerful data exploration tools—By showing the dataset as a spreadsheet, the Data Discovery platform offers freedom to filter and interact with the data in novel ways.
• Intuitive data visualizations—A picture is worth a thousand words, and nowhere is that truer than leveraging data visualizations to bring new perspectives on scientific questions.
• Open data APIs—Open data alone isn’t enough to fuel a new generation of insights. Open APIs are critical to making the data understandable, accessible, and actionable, based on the unique needs of the user or audience.

https://datadiscovery.nlm.nih.gov/browse

https://nlmdirector.nlm.nih.gov/2019/01/29/data-discovery-at-nlm/