ChemSpider Blog

A lot of people have been helping to improve the quality of ChemSpider content by depositing new data and “Cleaning up” errors in the data over the past few months. it’s been a long climb. Our thanks to all of you who have contributed. I’ll be the first one to put my hand up and acknowledge that in some ways I have not made the act of contributing to the curation process very easily since I’ve been feeding the data out via the blog in chunks, as it has developed. Following a recent “long flight” I am happy to announce that the Curators Handbook/Bible is now available in its first form and is available online here. This document gives some pretty detailed guidance regarding how to curate the ChemSpider database. As always we welcome feedback. If something is not clear let us know and we will expand/enhance as appropriate.

What I also want to do is to thank those people who have commented on how truly impressed they are with the rate at which we are cleaning the data. In general most curation requests identified on the site are addressed within 24 hours. There are some issues hanging out there that we don’t have solutions for at present, specifically in regards to organometallic data handling, but we are still thinking about a path forward.

It is finally time to rollout more attractive structure depictions. We have needed some more attractive structure depictions for a while but they have become an absolute must have as we rollout the following new capabilities:

1) The ability to make YOUR chemical blog structure searchable (watch this space…). We suggested one path previously…this is BETTER…

2) Structure balloons for using with our document markup tools, both browser-based and Microsoft Word based

We all judge quality of visual aesthetics quickly. We know a good structure when we see one. This is an announcement that we will be rolling out new structures across the site in the next few days. You will see better looking structures showing up across the site - during deposition, during service-based predictions, during searches and, well, everywhere. While not perfect as yet a little more tweaking and the entire database will be supported by the new structure depiction algorithms. As it is you should see some examples now on the database…one shown below. We welcome your feedback!