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FDA
openfda
Python2014–2025
FDA / openfda

openfda

openFDA is an FDA project to provide open APIs, raw data downloads, documentation and examples, and a developer community for an important collection of FDA public datasets.

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Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
723GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

openFDA is an FDA project to provide open APIs, raw data downloads, documentation and examples, and a developer community for an important collection of FDA public datasets.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-06-02 16:28:04 UTC to 2025-10-08 17:45:47 UTC.

0122014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
westurner·Dec 26, 2019
This looks great: I like the search timeline, the ability to easily search for free full-text meta-analyses (a selection bias we should all be aware of), the MeSH term listing in a reasonably-sized font, and that there's schema.org/ImageObject metadata within the page, but there's no [Medical]ScholarlyArticle metadata? I've worked with Google Scholar (:o) [1], Semantic Scholar (Allen Institute for AI) [2], Meta (Chan Zuckerberg Institute) [3], Zotero, Mendeley and a number of other tools for indexing and extracting metadata and graph relations from https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle and MedicalScholarlyArticles . Without RDFa (or Microdata, or JSON-LD) in PDF, there's a lot of parsing that has to go down in order to get a graph from the citations in the article. Each service adds value to this graph of resources. Pushing forward on publi
Read the rest
shing linked research that's reproducible (#LinkedResearch, #LinkedReproducibility) is a worthwhile investment in meta-research that we have barely yet addressed: > http://Schema.org/NewsArticle .citation: https://schema.org/citation ... Wouldn't it be great if NewsArticles linked to the ScholarlyArticle and/or Notebook CreativeWorks that they're .about (with reified relations)? > A practical use case: Alice wants to publish a ScholarlyArticle [1] (in HTML with structured data, as a PDF) predicated upon Datasets [2] (as CSV, CSVW JSONLD, XLSX (DataDownload)) with static HTML (and no special HTTP headers). 1 https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle 2 https://schema.org/Dataset* > B wants to build a meta analysis: to collect a # of ScholarlyArticles and Dataset DataDownloads; review study controls and data; merge, join, & concatenate Datasets if appropriate, and inductively or deductively infer a conclusion and suggestions for further studies of variance* The Linked Open Data Cloud shows the edges, the relations, the structured data links between very many (life sciences) datasets: https://lod-cloud.net/ . https://5stardata.info/en/ lists TimBL's suggested 5-start deployment schema for Open Data; which culuminates in publishing linked open data in non-proprietary formats that uses URIs to describe and link to things. Could any of these [1][2][3][4][5] services cross-link the described resources, given a common URI identifier such as https://schema.org/identifier and/or https://schema.org/url ? ORCID is a service for generating stable identifiers for researchers and publishers who have names in common but different emails. W3C DID solves for this need in a different way. When I check an article result page with the OpenLink OSDS extension (or any of a number of other tools for extracting structured data from HTML pages (and documents!) https://github.com/CodeForAntarctica/codeforantarctica.githu... ), there could be quite a bit more data there for search engines, browser extensions, and meta-research tools. Is this something like ElasticSearch on the backend? It is possible to store JSON-LD documents in the search index. I threw together elasticsearchjsonld to "Generate JSON-LD @contexts from ElasticSearch JSON Mappings" for the OpenFDA FAERS data a few year ago. That's not GraphQL or SPARQL, but it's something and it's Linked Data. re: "Canada's Decision To Make Public More Clinical Trial Data Puts Pressure On FDA" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21232183 > We really could get more out of this data through international collaboration and through linked data (e.g. URIs for columns). See: "Open, and Linked, FDA data" https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/5#issuecomment-5392966... and "ENH: Adverse Event Count / 'Use' Count Heatmap" https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/49 . With sales/usage counts, we'd have a denominator with which we could calculate relative hazard. W3C Web Annotations handle threaded comments and highlights; reviewing the reviewers is left as an exercise for the reader. Does Zotero still make it easy to save the bibliographic metadata for one or more ScholarlyArticles from PubMed to a collection in the cloud (and add metadata/annotations)? Sorry to toot my own horn here. Great job on this. This opens up many new opportunities for research. [1] https://scholar.google.com [2] https://www.semanticscholar.org/ [3] https://www.meta.org/ [4] https://zotero.org/ [5] https://mendeley.org/
In Announcing the New PubMed
westurner·Oct 12, 2019
We really could get more out of this data through international collaboration and through linked data (e.g. URIs for columns). See: "Open, and Linked, FDA data" https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/5#issuecomment-5392966... and "ENH: Adverse Event Count / 'Use' Count Heatmap" https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/49 With sales/usage counts, we'd have a denominator with which we could calculate relative hazard.
In Canada's Decision To Make Public More Clinical Trial Data Puts Pressure On FDA

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