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Happy Birthday to ChemSpider One Year Old Today
Posted by: Antony Williams in UncategorizedCopyright©2008 Antony Williams
On March 24th 2007 we gave birth to a “Spider”…it arrived as most new births new..coughing, spluttering, belching and not too pretty. Nevertheless, it’s growing nicely, has been cleaned up a lot since day one and is developing new friends. ChemSpider is part of the family of Free Access databases and definitely has a place on the team.
With ChemSpider’s first birthday we should take time to acknowledge our firsts in the Free Access structure database environment (these are based on my knowledge of what’s available and I welcome any corrections).
1) First real time online curation system for structure-identifier pairs
2) First real time structure-deposition system - association with publications, analytical data and supplementary information
3) First system to use InChIStrings and Keys as a basis of structure deduplication and searching
4) First system to allow online deposition of analytical data, images and CIF files associated with structure
5) First system to “take a stab” at offering support for Open Notebook Science with supporting web services and integration to a structure collection.
We thank all of our supporters, users, advocates and naysayers for your feedback and comments regarding ChemSpider. Your input has been very valuable in helping to improve our service. In recognition of their contributions I name the following people for their contributions:
Curator of the Year: Barrie Walker, UK
Depositor of the Year: Chris Singleton, US
Feedback of the Year: Heinz Kolshorn, Germany
Collaborator of the Year: Will Griffiths, Chemrefer (and now member of ChemSpider)
Community Builder of the Year: Joerg Wegner (Belgium?)
What are we working on now and in the near future?
1) A system for integrated text and structure searching of Open and Free Access scientific publications
2) Mounting multiple data sources online including an expanded dataset for IuCr integration, the Wikipedia Chemistry dataset, multiple vendors datasets (over a million additional compounds), a new SureChem patent integration dataset, safety data from MSDS sheets
3) The division of chemical names and synonyms from database IDs for ease of navigation through the system
4) The scraping and aggregation of CIF files from multiple sources and publication online
5) The deposition of new spectral datasets supplied by collaborators and friends of ChemSpider.
6) Unveiling the batch deposition process to allow users to deposit tens of thousands of structures should they wish
7) Additional support for Open notebook Science advocates
Supporting substances which cannot be easily represented in a structure format but can be represented using a registry number - minerals, polymers, mixtures etc
9) Website redesign for improved ease of use and navigation
Just like the Queen of England has two birthdays ChemSpider will, all being well, celebrate the first day of Spring ACS by lifting our Beta label from our website in April. We went live on the day before Chicago’s Spring ACS last year and have kept going ever since…
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March 24th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Happy Birthday!
The plan for the future looks great, I’d love to help any way I can. Especially for the polymer database, I used to be in polymers and would like to dabble a bit more. Kepp up the good work!
March 27th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Gelukkige verjaardag !
Belgium is correct! And for those which are not from Europe, we Europeans are not speaking all the same language! I was born in Germany and yes, they speak another language in Belgium, e.g. Dutch and French. I life in the Dutch part, so I learn Dutch at the moment.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:28 am
keep up the good work!in order to have a better world.I´d like to help any way,a can,I´m from Mexico,and I’ll help specially in Orgnic chemestry.