This is the second in a series of blog posts introducing the LCOI-API.   We’ll be looking at a couple of its features, encouraging its use by developers to create solutions in the spirit of clinical open innovation.  Read the first post of this series here.

You may have read a few days ago that we launched version 1.0 of our LillyCOI-API.  We mentioned that the genesis of an Open Clinical Intelligence Network (OCIN) means that developers, informaticists and others will be able to create their own applications to Collect, Consume, Curate and Connect around digitized clinical objects.

As you know, V1.0 initially sources data from clinicaltrials.gov and transforms it into a format that web app developers can work with.  It is currently read-only, but we wanted to highlight a couple of the ways our LCOI-API accomplishes that transformation.

First, we elected to use JSON and Exhibit JSON data notation.  Clinicaltrials.gov uses XML for data handling, but XML requires the developer to go through more steps to reach the same result, and is not easily web-ready.

JSON notation makes it easy for JavaScript in a web page to download and process the data.  Using a library such as jQuery makes it even easier.  Here’s a quick example that shows how to get the list of intervention categories using our API: More…