Not to be confused with that of Antony Williams who is still vey much ChemSpiderman.

ChemSpider will be there to hear and record what is being said. If you are going to be there look out for David Sharpe and Aileen Day.

We will of course report back on topics that pertain to ChemSpider and the greater world of chemistry publishing.

Background: Previously, we developed a combined dictionary dubbed Chemlist for the identification of small molecules and drugs in text based on a number of publicly available databases and tested it on an annotated corpus. To achieve an acceptable recall and precision we used a number of automatic and semi-automatic processing steps together with disambiguation rules. However, it remained to be investigated which impact an extensive manual curation of a multi-source chemical dictionary would have on chemical term identification in text. ChemSpider is a chemical database that has undergone extensive manual curation aimed at establishing valid chemical name-to-structure relationships.

The presentation was recorded and will be available shortly. For now the actual presentation is given below.

Oops and Downs of Resolving InChIs For the Chemistry Community (Link to Slideshare)

The InChI resolver was rolled out to the community in March 2009 with the purpose of providing a centralized resource for chemists to resolve InChIs (International Chemical Identifiers). This presentation will provide an overview of the development of the underlying technologies associated with the InChI resolver, and how the resolver is being used, integrated and enhanced to provide additional value to the chemistry community. We will discuss present limitations to application of the resolver for providing access to databases and chemistry information distributed across the internet and define our vision for enhancing interconnectivity across Open databases using the InChI resolver as the glue.

ChemSpider: Building a knowledge-based community for chemists using social and data networking technologies (Link to Slideshare)

In less than 2 years ChemSpider has become one of the primary online resources for chemists providing access to an unsurpassed aggregate of free-access knowledge and data. ChemSpider was developed with the intention of providing a structure centric community for chemists that would be enhanced by data depositions, curations and annotations by the community. The system presently hosts over 21.5 million chemical compounds from over 200 data sources. Working with a network of advisors, collaborators and data providers ChemSpider has created a unique resource of integrated information for chemists. These efforts have enabled us to support the curation of the Wikipedia chemistry pages, the production of a community supported Open Access chemistry journal and provision of web services integrated to spectrometer systems distributed around the world. This talk will provide an overview of how ChemSpider utilized social and data networking to create a community for chemistry.

Building an integrated system for chemistry markup and online publishing integrated to online chemistry resources (Link to Slideshare)

The extraction of chemical entities from documents such as patents and publications has been pursued for a number of years. We wish to report on ChemMantis, an integrated system for chemistry-based entity extraction and document mark-up enabling access to the rich resource of online chemistry know as ChemSpider. We will discuss the development of the platform from its inception as a series of dictionaries to the integration of an entity extraction algorithm and its expansion to a public deposition and publishing platform for chemistry. Chemistry articles can now be deposited, marked-up and exposed to the public within a few minutes in many cases making it an ideal platform for communicating research and providing integrated access to data sources including PubChem, ChEBI, Wikipedia and Entrez.

The Spectral Game: leveraging Open Data and crowdsourcing for education

Jean-Claude Bradley , Robert J Lancashire , Andrew SID Lang and Antony J Williams

Journal of Cheminformatics 2009, 1:9doi:10.1186/1758-2946-1-9

Abstract (provisional)

We report on the implementation of the Spectral Game, a web-based game where players try to match molecules to various forms of interactive spectra including 1D/2D NMR, Mass Spectrometry and Infrared spectra. Each correct selection earns the player one point and play continues until the player supplies an incorrect answer. The game is usually played using a web browser interface, although a version has been developed in the virtual 3D environment of Second Life. Spectra uploaded as Open Data to ChemSpider in JCAMP-DX format are used for the problem sets together with structures extracted from the website. The spectra are displayed using JSpecView, an Open Source spectrum viewing applet which affords zooming and integration. The application of the game to the teaching of proton NMR spectroscopy in an undergraduate organic chemistry class and a 2D Spectrum Viewer are also presented.

Computer-assisted methods for molecular structure elucidation: realizing a spectroscopist’s dream

Mikhail Elyashberg, Kirill Blinov, Sergey Molodtsov, Yegor Smurnyy, Antony J Williams and Tatiana Churanova

Journal of Cheminformatics 2009, 1:3doi:10.1186/1758-2946-1-3

Abstract (provisional)

Background

This article coincides with the 40 year anniversary of the first published works devoted to the creation of algorithms for computer-aided structure elucidation (CASE). The general principles on which CASE methods are based will be reviewed and the present state of the art in this field will be described using, as an example, the expert system Structure Elucidator.

Results

The developers of CASE systems have been forced to overcome many obstacles hindering the development of a software application capable of drastically reducing the time and effort required to determine the structures of newly isolated organic compounds. Large complex molecules of up to 100 or more skeletal atoms with topological peculiarity can be quickly identified using the expert system Structure Elucidator based on spectral data. Logical analysis of 2D NMR data frequently allows for the detection of the presence of COSY and HMBC correlations of “nonstandard” length. Fuzzy structure generation provides a possibility to obtain the correct solution even in those cases when an unknown number of nonstandard correlations of unknown length are present in the spectra. The relative stereochemistry of big rigid molecules containing many stereocenters can be determined using the StrucEluc system and NOESY/ROESY 2D NMR data for this purpose.

Conclusions

The StrucEluc system continues to be developed in order to expand the general applicability, provide improved workflows, usability of the system and increased reliability of the results. It is expected that expert systems similar to that described in this paper will receive increasing acceptance in the next decade and will ultimately be integrated directly to analytical instruments for the purpose of organic analysis. Work in this direction is in progress. In spite of the fact that many difficulties have already been overcome to deliver on the spectroscopist’s dream of “fully automated structure elucidation” there is still work to do. Nevertheless, as the efficiency of expert systems is enhanced the solution of increasingly complex structural problems will be achievable.

I’m sharing this news as a public service to the community…this is excerpted from GenomeWeb

“NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — A bill aimed at limiting the open-access publishing policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health has been re-introduced in the US House of Representatives by Rep. John Conyers (D – Mich.), after the same legislation expired at the end of the 110th Congress.

The law would effectively overturn the policy NIH put into effect last year mandating that all NIH-funded investigators must submit electronic versions of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central within a year after they are officially published.”

More details are here…

We invite manuscripts from anybody interested in exposing their work in the field of chemistry and intersecting fields. In general we expect these communications to be 1500-3000 words in length but there is no limit. We encourage submissions relating to chemistry, biochemistry and chemical biology; regarding synthesis, the analytical sciences and computational chemistry; as research, as commentaries and as questions to the community. Provided the submission relates to the domain of the chemical sciences we will find a place for it within the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry. We encourage submissions from academia and industry, from students and senior scientists, from individuals and teams, for successful research or failed experiments. We encourage submitters to challenge us to host your manuscripts in a manner which most clearly communicates your science. This may include hosting various forms of data made available to the public as Open Data, providing visualization tools for the display of molecules, spectra, images and videos. We intend to not be constrained and to make full use of web-based tools available today and coming online tomorrow.

All articles will be Open Access articles. We will abide by the Budapest Open Access Initiative which declares “By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” Authors must agree to allow unrestricted reading, downloading, distribution, printing, searching and linking to the published work.

Over the past 2 years we believe we have demonstrated our passion for public science, our willingness to serve the community, and integrity in our actions. We hope that the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry will provide a vehicle to all scientists operating within the domain of the chemical sciences to expose their work and interests to the community. We intend to deliver a facile process of submission and superior tools for delivery. We welcome your support and look forward to expanding the communication of chemistry.

We have been working on the markup of chemistry documents for a number of months and I unveiled the first aspects of our work at the ACS meeting in Philadelphia. The presentation is available online on my Slideshare account. What we are trying to do is to use our ChemSpider platform as the foundation of a document markup system whereby chemical names are automatically identified and can either be converted to chemical structures (possible using algorithms for name to structure conversion) or are retrieved from our ChemSpider database. We have invested a lot of efforts to curate and validate the ChemSpider database of over 21.5 million unique chemical entities over the past year and are now sitting on a foundation of information allowing us to connect between chemical identifiers, chemical structures and out to rich sources such as Wikipedia and PubChem and to provide information such as chemical vendors and other online systems. ChemMantis is well and truly weved into the web of ChemSpider now.

We are now in alpha release and are adding some finishing tweaks to the markup system, the visualization elements and the  workflow. You can see the immediate effects of our recent work on improving the quality of structure images in the balloon below.

We_would_like to test the system on YOUR documents if you are willing to participate. What we are looking for are WORD documents for already published papers. They can be Open or Closed access papers. We are not expecting copyright transfer – we want to markup the documents and return to you for feedback. In the process we will be testing the quality of our Dictionary, our conversions, our visulaizations and our process. We welcome your support. Feel free to connect with us at infoATchemspiderDOTcom. Over the next few weeks you will hear more about ChemMantis and our contributions to text mining and markup of chemistry documents.