Health portal/Step2
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Downloading raw materials
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 doesn't produce an excess of files.
See general version (not MedLinePlus specific) of a content bundling script being developed here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Content_bundle_making_script
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. Government works. There are however, deeper link levels that present content that is covered by copyright of various corporate sub-contractors that do not fall under the U. S. Government 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 that 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 also 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,