2.4. Create Variables

The “new.irb” robot we have created can do literature search and Web navigations automatically. Our purpose, however, is to extract the literature information and save them into a database. We will achieve this by extracting Web information during robot navigation, defining variables to store the information, and saving the variable data into local databases. We will define some variables to store the abstract author, title and text in this section.

From the “pubmed” task created previously (shown below) we will define four variables: AbstractURL, Title, Author, and Abstract from the 3, 4, 5 and 6^th actions, respectively.

Right-click the forth action: “Extract data like ‘Analysis of ***’”, and select the “Name Variable …” menu item, as below.

It shows a dialog box as the following. Give it a name “Title”, select a data transformation option: “Exclude all tags”, and press [OK].

Similarly, define Author and Abstract for the 5 and 6^th action. The “pubmed” task becomes:

Finally, we are going to define the AbstractURL from the 3^rd action, which is more complex. Bring up a result page including a list of entries from the pubmed search in the browser panel like:

Then right-click on the 3^rd action “Get a list of links like ***”, and select the “Name Variables …” menu item. It shows:

As you can see, the search result page serves as an example page for data columns. Put a name “AbstractURL” after the “COLUMN3”, select a transformation “Absolute url of hyperlink” after it, and click the [Update]. It shows:

Notice that URLs are shown in the sample table in the lower half of the page. Now click [Return]. We have finished defining the four variables.