LLIS Data Instructions

The NASA lessons learned information system is available to the public at: https://llis.nasa.gov/

NASA-internal personnel can retrieve an excel file of the data via the NASA Enginnering Network.

Non-NASA users can obtain the data via the webscraper.

Webscraper requirements are:

• requests

• selenium (https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/)

• beautiful soup

• time

• pandas

Notes about webscraping:

• The LLIS pages require at least a one second time delay between scraping to allow the data to load.

• The webscraper provided uses the chrome webdriver, which must be installed in the location where the webscraper runs.

• The webscraper opens a chrome page for every lesson, which can be disruptive. Keeps this in mind.

• There around about 2,100 documents in the LLIS and the document numbers do not correspond directly to the count, so we added a csv file containing all valid lesson ID numbers to speed webscraping.

• To scrape the entire LLIS, the estimated run time is around a day.

• It is recommended to run the webscraper with the test lesson set prior to scraping the entire dataset to ensure it runs properly.

• The webscraped version of the LLIS will require more data cleaning than the NASA-internal version, specifically with endline characters (”n”).