ITP: Biomail - automated medical searcher
Package: wnpp
Version: N/A; reported 2000-08-19
Severity: important
Author is excited about getting this packaged for Debian.
Homepage is http://biomail.sourceforge.net
License is GPL
I think this will go into contrib, since it uses PubMed's database,
and it is pretty useless without access to their database. The code itself
is free, and I think someone could easily modify this into doing many other
similar database searches. Imagine if someone tweaked this to do searches
on common web sites, so it would email you anytime the topic you desired
was mentioned.
I'm still waiting in the new maintainer queue, but I'm sure I can get this
uploaded via sponsorship.
BioMail is a small web-based application for medical researchers,
biologists, and anyone who wants to know the latest information about
a disease or a biological phenomenon. It is written to automate
searching for recent scientific papers in the PubMed Medline database.
BioMail is free and will stay free.
What does BioMail do?
Periodically BioMail does a user-customized Medline search and sends
all matching articles recently added to Medline to the users' e-mail
address. HTML-formatted e-mails generated by BioMail can be used to
view selected references in medline format (compatible with most
reference manager programs).
Why is BioMail helpful?
If you use Medline, it may be hard to remember when you did your last
search. Often you must scan titles you have already seen to be certain
you didn't miss an important reference. BioMail will perform routine
searches for you. This program alerts users to all new papers in their
fields automatically. It also helps the user to 'refine' search
patterns once and for all. There is no need to wonder: 'What was that
great search pattern I used last Saturday?'. All patterns are safe in
the database and can be accessed, tuned, or deleted any time.
It is also useful for countries where access to the Internet is not
yet widely available. If a person has a permanent e-mail address, but
only sporadic www access, she/he only needs to fill out a BioMail form
once and then will receive new references from Medline continually.
License
It is released under GNU GPL license. This means it can be freely
used, distributed, modified and redistributed as a new application, or
it can even be sold for money, as long as the original or modified
source codes remain freely available (and a little respect to the
author is shown).
Requirements
BioMail was written in Perl for Linux. It was also checked under San
Solaris7, Irix 6.5 (on SGI), Tru64 Unix 4.OE (on Digital alpha), and
should be fine for other Unix OSes.
BioMail requires a standard Perl distribution and two additional Perl
modules from CPAN -- LWP::Simple and Mail::Mailer.
Code by Dmitry Mozzherin (dim@pharm.sunysb.edu)
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