Extraction of structured data from partially structured LabTrove posts.

All posts with the metadata key “DNA” and the metadata value “oligonucleotide” were extracted from the LabTrove blog at http://biolab.isis.rl.ac.uk/camerons_labblog. Despite inconsistency in the description of the oligonucleotides it is possible to obtain structured data from posts that could be used to populate other tables or a relational database as desired. The tables in each post were parsed and data extracted from them, based only on the structure from the table. The extracted data were then converted to a tabular form in html and reformatted into this table. Five rows were removed representing posts where oligonucleotides were described only in free text form. Two columns, one with no entries, and one headed Property with ‘Data’ in every row, resulting from the top row of tables, are not shown for clarity. The columns have been re-ordered. The code that generated the tabular data as well as the data it generated is provided in the Supplementary Information.