I started the Munging Metadata blog on blogspot in 2013, but really didn’t dedicate much time to it. There were always more pressing demands on my time. Now I’m renewing my commitment to blogging by moving it to my GitHub site and dedicating it to highlighting my personal technical projects as well as discussing technical topics related to my work at CDISC.
For those that don’t know me, you can check out the About Me page on this site or on LinkedIn. This blog will cover topics of interest related to software, standards, and clinical research informatics. Most of the posts will be technical, and my non-technical writing may more likely be found on the CDISC web site.
The purpose of the blog is not only to share the details of my personal technical projects, but also to share technical insights and opinions on topics related to clinical research informatics and CDISC with other folks that take an interest in the same topics. Ideally this fosters a dialog on interesting topics that affect our field, and it helps to share information not easily found elsewhere.
As CDISC turns to focus more on the implementation of its standards, the work and organization are becoming a bit more technical. CDISC has also started working to encourage and support open source software projects - more on this in future blog posts. These trends create the need for an expanded exchange of technical information, and this blog seeks to play a small role in filling that gap.
A few topics that I’ll spend some time covering in the blog in the relatively near term are odmlib, CDISC Library, ODM v2.0, HL7 FHIR, and some projects related to these topics. You’ve likely not yet heard about odmlib. This is a new Python package I’m creating to scratch a personal itch to have a simple, object-oriented library for creating and processing ODM documents. My goal is to share odmlib in case others might find it useful, and open the project to other contributors should they be motivated to improve some of its many shortcomings.