CancerNet redistribution via WWW.

CancerNet from the National Cancer Institute contains nearly 500 ASCII-files, updated monthly, with up-to-date information about cancer and the "Golden Standard" in tumor therapy. Perl scripts are used to convert these files to HTML-documents. A complex algorithm, using regular expression matching and extensive exception handling, detects headlines, listings and other constructs of the original ASCII-text and converts them into their HTML-counterparts. A table of contents is also created during the process. The resulting files are indexed for full-text search via WAIS. Building the complete CancerNet WWW redistribution takes less than two hours with a minimum of manual work. For 26,000 requests of information from our service per month the average costs for the worldwide delivery of one document is about 19 cents.