ChemSpider Blog

Users of ChemSpider might have noticed some performance isseus in the past 2-3 weeks with our web services, service availability and speed of searches. I put my hand in the air and say “Yup, acknowledged”. Hopefully they have not been too disruptive BUT it is for the overall benefit of the service ultimately. We have been streaming in 8 MILLION links to Pubmed in order to make Pubmed structure and substructure searchable. We are NOT rolling this out with full fanfare yet but I do want to explain the performance issues you might be experiencing. We work on Microsoft technology and while we are advocates for the platforms of .NET, IIS and SQL Server we definitely are putting them under pressure as we keep expanding the database and adding more value. We have thoughts about how to resolve this but want to finishg populating the tables first.

The upside….the majority of links are already in place. For an example visit a structure and look for PubMed as a data source and click on one of the links. For example, for Valium here you will see in the datasource table a series of Pubmed IDs next to the PubMed datasource…

These will link you out to PubMed directly. Try it out…

Now, do we have implementation issues? YES. The lists of external IDs can be long so right now we show only the first 10. We wiil deal with display of others shortly. We need to provide a way to curate out “junk” entries. For example, “methyl” is on Chemspider as a fragment and has links to PubMed IDs…you’ll see why if you click them..it was done with text mining. These issues will be resolved but for now we announce that PubMed is structure and substructure searchable via ChemSpider. We will explain how we did it shortly but for now we will acknowledge the massive contribution of our colleagues at SureChem. More to come…

There has been an outpouring of offers from the ChemSpider community in terms of helping to examine/clean and enhance information regarding carbohydrates on ChemSpider. Almost 2 dozen users have now made an offer to help. Very exciting really!

I’ve already outlined the necessity to improve the quality of associations between structures and identifiers on the database. However, I am also hoping that users will write articles about carbohydrates using the rich-text formatting capabilities (ADD Description), will add spectra if they have them, will link up articles if they have interesting papers and will add URLs to interesting online content also.

We have now delivered the ability to curate and enhance records on ChemSpider and look forward to having our users help, starting with Carbohydrates…

I previously blogged that ChemSpider and Article 2.0 might be a good match. I commented on some of the things that we might be able to do:

“7500 articles and complete freedom to present the articles as we see fit. Enticing! What do we already have on ChemSpider that we could reuse?

1) Structure deposition

2) Analytical data and image deposition

3) Integration to other data via URLs

4) Add comments/description

5) Text markup with “Chemical enhancements”

6) A dataset of >21 million structures and integration to over 120 data sources

7) Good ideas …

Article 2.0 looks interesting…we hope to be involved” 

The contest site has now been updated. It is a little different than what we had imagined. The contest rules state: “We’re hoping you can develop many different journal article rendering alternatives by leveraging the Elsevier Article 2.0 API. The Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest is not about downloading all of the content in the contest repository and building a new search engine or identifying relationships amongst the individual articles contained in the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest repository. While this is certainly an interesting exercise, the purpose of the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest is to provide new alternatives for rendering individual journal articles.” There are also no cemistry journals listed in the FAQ list.

At this point it us unlikley that we will participate in the contest at all.