Search Engine
Determining your iGEM research topic is no easy feat, and it can be a challenge to come up with something that really suits the needs of your team, as well as your personal research interests
Since the creation of the iGEM Foundation, some 2000 projects have been worked on, by teams from all over the world. Their wikis offer a vast amount of knowledge and inspiration. However, iGEM’s own servers do not allow you to easily access this data in a structured manner. This means that you could accidentally settle on a project that has already been done, or can’t find the right collaborators for your research.
In an effort to make it easier for future iGEM teams to find collaborators for their projects, as well as allow them to be inspired by work from previous years, iGEM Groningen 2019 came up with ‘iGEMdb’, a tool that indexes all the data from iGEM teams and presents it in a structured, searchable manner:
json was used to organize the data structure
With iGEMdb it is possible to search for teams by such criteria as medals, tracks, or even region. It also boasts a full-text search feature which matches your search query against all project titles and abstracts to find the best match.
json was used to organize the data structure
This file is then fed to a json feed parser we set up for our website. This parser breaks up all the individual information, and turns it into pages. By combining this methodology with the powerful web development tools offered by Drupal 7, we were able to construct a full-fledged search engine for all data entered:
Future plans involve a scraper that can automatically extract information from next year’s teams. Such an extension could even allow for entire team wikis to be searchable with appropriate filtering.
As iGEM’s own servers do not allow its users to build more complex applications, iGEMdb will be hosted by the iGEM Groningen team for now. We are however open to collaborate and extend on this project with any future teams.
