Fourmi

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Developing branch:

Fourmi is an web scraper for chemical substances. The program is designed to be used as a search engine to search multiple chemical databases for a specific substance. The program will produce all available attributes of the substance and conditions associated with the attributes. Fourmi also attempts to estimate the reliability of each data point to assist the user in deciding which data should be used.

The Fourmi project is open source project licensed under the MIT license. Feel free to contribute!

Fourmi is based on the Scrapy framework, an open source web scraping framework for python. Most of the functionality of this project can be traced to this framework. Should the documentation for this application fall short, we suggest you take a close look at the [Scrapy architecture] (http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/architecture.html) and the Scrapy documentation.

Installing

If you're installing Fourmi, please take a look at our installation guide on our wiki. When you've installed the application, make sure to check our usage guide.

Using the Source

To use the Fourmi source code multiple dependencies are required. Take a look at the wiki page on using the application source code for a step by step installation guide.

When developing for the Fourmi project keep in mind that code readability is a must. To maintain the readability, code should be conform with the PEP-8 style guide for Python code. More information about the different structures and principles of the Fourmi application can be found on our wiki.

To Do

The Fourmi project has the following goals for the nearby future:

Main goals:

• Improve our documentation and guides. (Assignee: Dekker)
• Build an graphical user interface(GUI) as alternative for the command line interface(CLI). (Assignee: Harmen)
• Compiling the source into an windows executable. (Assignee: Bas)
• Create an configuration file to hold logins and API keys.
• Determine reliability of our data point.
• Create an module to gather data from NIST. (Assignee: Rob)
• Create an module to gather data from PubChem. (Assignee: Nout)

Side goals:

• Clean and unify data.
• Extensive reliability analysis using statistical tests.
• Test data with Descartes 1.

Project Origin

The Fourmi project was started in February of 2014 as part of a software engineering course at the Radboud University for students studying Computer Science, Information Science or Artificial Intelligence. Students participate in a real software development project as part of the Giphouse.

This particular project was started on behalf of Ivo B. Rietveld. As a chemist he was in need of an application to automatically search information on chemical substances and create an phase diagram. The so called "Descrates" project was split into two teams each creating a different application that has part of the functionality. We are the team Descartes 2 and as we were responsible for creating a web crawler, we've named our application Fourmi (Englis: Ants).

The following people were part of the original team:

• Jip J. Dekker
• Rob ten Berge
• Harmen Prins
• Bas van Berkel
• Nout van Deijck
• Michail Kuznetcov