Health portal/Step2

This page describes the details of a content harvesting project aimed at creating an .xol bundle of content from the U.S. National Library of Medicine's MedLinePlus webpage (at least the first layer which is explicitly free of copyright).

Such a bundle and the index pages downloaded with it present an opportunity to start an off-line browsable Health Portal. Additional material can be added to this portal by adding an HTML file to the collection and inserting a link to that file in the two index pages, (one by subject, one by alphabetical listing). The point of this is to empower local management of content, objectionable content may be removed (rather than refusal of the entire bundle) and locally important material can easily be integrated with only simple HTML authoring skills.

Starting with the content scrape

execute these 4 commands (requires wget tool)

wget -rp -l1 -o logfile1 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/healthtopics.html

Downloaded: 184 files, 2.7M in 15s (176 KB/s)

Cumulative downloaded: 184 files, 2.7M

wget -rp -l1 -o logfile2 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/spanish/healthtopics.html

Downloaded: 168 files, 2.5M in 14s (185 KB/s)

Cumulative downloaded: 276 files, 4.9M

wget -rp -l1 -o logfile3 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/all_healthtopics.html

Downloaded: 1378 files, 49M in 2m 42s (310 KB/s)

Cumulative downloaded: 1552 files, 53M

wget -rp -l1 -o logfile4 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/spanish/all_healthtopics.html

Downloaded: 1308 files, 30M in 2m 18s (224 KB/s)

Total Downloaded: 2297 files, 73M

This is a deliberately redundant retrieval, many files will be retrieved more than once, but "clobbering" (overwriting) is allowed, so this doewsn't prodcue an excess of files.

Consideration of Copyright issues

Good guidance here: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/faq/copyrightfaq.html

The homepage, the summaries on the Health Topics pages, the FAQs, and the same pages on MedlinePlus (en español) are all free of copyright and in the public domain by virtue of being U.S. Governemnt works. There are however, deeper link levels tha present content that is covered by copyright of various corporate sub-contractors tha do not fall under the U. S. Goverenment exemption from copyright.

Problematic areas

It would be really nice to have this, but it's probably not going to happen "The A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia includes over 4,000 articles about diseases, tests, symptoms, injuries, and surgeries. It also contains an extensive library of medical photographs and illustrations."

Maybe figure out a way to frame links to this site (only accessible with internet connection, not off-line version). The idea would be to use something like the Google translation template links so tha the request is for the site at NIH, but via a google translation engine. This way, links are left in, people are sent to the original (in English), but alos have one-click option to get it via a Google translated page. Yes, relying on Google to translate health ideas is not "a good thing", but it is better than not having any access at all to health information.

X-Plain Tutorial (similar issues with using this content) http://www.patient-education.com/nlm/terms/

For follow-up

Other language content linked from here should be looked at:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/languages/languages.html

Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bosnian, Burmese, Chamorro, Chinese, Chuukese, Croatian, Farsi, French, French Creole, German, Gujarathi, Hindi, Hmong, Ilocano, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Kirundi, Korean, Kurdish, Laotian, Marshallese, Navajo, Panjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Tigrinya, Tongan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese,

Need to review images grabbed, keep navigation, lose ADAM pics. Replace some with CC images or lose altogether. Try running the scripts above with out the -p flag set and compare filesets, transfer over those page-element images that are still needed. Use names of images to be excluded to hunt them down in the HTML for editing out.

Need to trim some stuff in each downloaded health topic:

• Tone down NIH branding while preserving attribution, lose or modify footer for instance. Keep some attribution, preserve a link back to NIH site for original or updated content.
• Need to figure out what to do with links that are next hop. They go off to stuff that may have copyright or be too US specific. Can delete big chunks of bottom of each page.
• Nice feature, to look at. I think in the current form it should allow easy back and forth between English and Spanish.
• It might make sense to globally restructure for easier i18n/l10n. For instance, this currently uses separate folder for Spanish, that is fine, but try to i18n-ize the structure so that is one or more lang-xx folders.

Get my grep snd PERL skills polished for bulk global edits on whole directories of files at once, must find my copy of llama book.