Comments on: Supporting Shorthand Formulae to Support ChemMantis

By: Paul Schulwitz

Paul Schulwitz — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:29:43 +0000

You know something like this would be very nice for patent searchers. I’m constantly having to refer to the specification of patents to find the chemical structure of shorthand terms listed in the claims. Even then I often need to go to another resource to identify a structure.
Just having this ability to quickly identify structures for common protecting groups (BOC, Cbz, etc.) and amino acids, esp. uncommon amino acids would be a great time saver.

By: Antony Williams

Antony Williams — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:43:32 +0000

Rich..we are presently working with a number of closed access articles and not seeing much difference in those articles either in terms of shorthand formulae so I think our list is actually fairly good at present. The dictionaries we are building would certainly be of significant benefit to groups working in text mining and chemistry document markup. We hope to recoup our costs through the licensing of these dictionaries to interested parties.

By: Rich Apodaca

Rich Apodaca — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:37:44 +0000

Tony, very nice. It seems likely that a dictionary of abbreviations/connection tables built and improved by testing against real documents might be useful outside the scope of ChemSpider/Mantis.

Any plans to offer this dictionary separately?