On Tuesday, we had a meeting with Cathy and reported in detail about what we have learned so far. We reported that we had discovered that the best way to access the data remotely is JDBC(Java DataBase Connectivity) after reading and comparing with ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) and some other similiar tools. We also showed her the script we had found on the website that would load UMLS(Unified Medical Language System) into a database.
Our goal for now is download UMLS first, untar it (the document is huge ). Then put the data into MySQL (a most used open source database serve) in medinfo directory on our server because UMLS's server is often down. After we set up the whole database, we'll use JDBC to access the data remotely in the MySQL database.
So first we need to find out how big UMLS is. The full Metathesaurus occupies 3.00 GB and a minimum of 8 GB free disk space is required to use MetamorphoSys. We also found out MySQL is able to do the job. Then we went ahead and downloaded UMLS. During the unzip process, I learned unzip and untar. We also downloaded MySQL. It's still sitting on the server unzipped because we are waiting for instructions on where to put it.