ChemSpider Blog

Over the past three years I’ve carried a double-edged sword on the ChemSpider Blog: the honor and the burden.

As anyone who runs a blog would likely tell you hosting a blog can take a lot of time and effort, especially if you are passionate about communicating. Fortunately, since ChemSpider was acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry we now have a lot more people involved with the platform including support staff and our colleagues in the Cambridge, UK-based Informatics team. Since we are working hard to further integrate various processes, systems and projects it makes sense that more of the team discussing our activities around ChemSpider can post here. In particular there are a number of activities going on regarding the technical aspects of ChemSpider development that will start to show up on this blog and we encourage your participation, comments and feedback. ChemSpider is, after all, about community participation so do engage us!

Over the next few days a number of my colleagues will introduce themselves to the readers of this blog. I welcome them all to the “honor and the burden”…it’s a pleasure to share this space with them.

In the first of many integration projects presently underway inside the RSC to bring together the benefits of ChemSpider with existing systems we’re happy to announce that the Prospected compound pages are now using structure images from ChemSpider as shown below. We spent a lot of time creating aesthetically pleasing structure images for ChemSpider and especially for display on webpages and blogs so we’re happy to see them show up in other venues too.

We unveiled the ability to embed chemical structure images as well as embedding spectra last year. Now there are multiple blogs using the embed functionality, structures are starting to show up on Wikipedia and our web services are being used for structure image retrieval. We encourage you to make use of the resources we are delivering and any feedback.