Richard Kidd

ChemSpider - building a foundation for the semantic web by hosting a crowd sourced databasing platform for chemistry

There is an increasing availability of free and open access resources for chemists to use on the internet. Coupled with the increasing availability of Open Source software tools we are in the middle of a revolution in data availability and tools to manipulate these data. ChemSpider is a free access website for chemists built with the intention of providing a structure centric community for chemists. It was developed with the intention of aggregating and indexing available sources of chemical structures and their associated information into a single searchable repository and making it available to everybody, at no charge. There are tens if not hundreds of chemical structure databases such as literature data, chemical vendor catalogs, molecular properties, environmental data, toxicity data, analytical data etc. and no single way to search across them. Despite the fact that there were a large number of databases containing chemical compounds and data available online their inherent quality, accuracy and completeness was lacking in many regards. The intention with ChemSpider was to provide a platform whereby the chemistry community could contribute to cleaning up the data, improving the quality of data online and expanding the information available to include data such as reaction syntheses, analytical data, experimental properties and linking to other valuable resources. It has grown into a resource containing over 21 million unique chemical structures from over 200 data sources. ChemSpider has enabled real time curation of the data, association of analytical data with chemical structures, real-time deposition of single or batch chemical structures (including with activity data) and transaction-based predictions of physicochemical data. The social community aspects of the system demonstrate the potential of this approach. Curation of the data continues daily and thousands of edits and depositions by members of the community have dramatically improved the quality of the data relative to other public resources for chemistry. This presentation will provide an overview of the history of ChemSpider, the present capabilities of the platform and how it can become one of the primary foundations of the semantic web for chemistry. It will also discuss some of the present projects underway since the acquisition of ChemSpider by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Towards virtual knowledge broker services for semantic integration of life science literature and data sources.

Research in the life sciences requires ready access to primary data, derived information and relevant knowledge from a multitude of sources. Integration and interoperability of such resources are crucial for sharing content across research domains relevant to the life sciences. In this article we present a perspective review of data integration with emphasis on a semantics driven approach to data integration that pushes content into a shared infrastructure, reduces data redundancy and clarifies any inconsistencies. This enables much improved access to life science data from numerous primary sources. The Semantic Enrichment of the Scientific Literature (SESL) pilot project demonstrates feasibility for using already available open semantic web standards and technologies to integrate public and proprietary data resources, which span structured and unstructured content. This has been accomplished through a precompetitive consortium, which provides a cost effective approach for numerous stakeholders to work together to solve common problems.

Utilizing open source software to facilitate communication of chemistry at RSC

Abstract: The Royal Society of Chemistry is one of the world’s premier chemistry publishers and has an established reputation for the development of award-winning platforms such as Prospect and ChemSpider. Using a small but agile in-house development team, we have combined commercial and open source software tools to develop the platforms necessary to deliver capabilities to our community of users. This book chapter will review the systems that have been developed in-house, what they deliver to the community, the challenges encountered in developing our systems and utilizing open source code, and how we have extended available code to make it fit-for-purpose.

Comment: 2004's fastest organic and biomolecular chemistry!

In January 2004, the Royal Society of Chemistry launched Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry (OBC) - a journal promising to provide high quality research from all aspects of synthetic, physical and biomolecular organic chemistry. The journal was set to build upon the foundations laid down by its predecessor publications (J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans. 1 and J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans. 2) as well as complement the subject coverage already published in prestigious general chemistry journals such as Chemical Communications and Chemical Society Reviews. Nearly two years on, just how is the programme developing and what can the community expect to see from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)?

Comment: 2004’s fastest organic and biomolecular chemistry!

In January 2003, the Royal Society of Chemistry launched Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry (OBC)--a journal promising to provide high quality research from all aspects of synthetic, physical and biomolecular organic chemistry. The journal was set to build upon the foundations laid down by its predecessor publications (J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans. 1 and J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans. 2) as well as complement the subject coverage already published in prestigious general chemistry journals such as Chemical Communications and Chemical Society Reviews. Nearly two years on, just how is the programme developing and what can the community expect to see from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)?