The role of open standards in publishing chemical information
A symposium entitled “Wikis, Blogs and Podcasting: Creating and Distributing Chemistry Teaching Materials in the Information Age” will be held as part of the national meeting of the German Chemical Society in Ulm, Sept. 16. – 19.. 2007, organized by the “Chemistry-Information-Computers (CIC)” division of the German Chemical Society and the “Chemical Information (CINF) division of the American Chemical Society. I’ve just submitted the abstract for my talk in this symposium and here it is:
Chemistry is significantly behind other disciplines like molecular biology in publishing chemical information in open access information systems – freely available to the scientific community. Only recently, we see this changing under the pressure of other scientific field which are in need of chemical information. One reason for the lack of such systems is that chemists are masters in obscuring and destroying information when publishing in the primary scientific literature. Even after more than 10 years of digital online publishing PuTTY SSH execute remote command , in the age of ultimately cheap digital storage capacity, we publish spectra as peak lists with fuzzy semantics and great artistic freedom, chemical structures as bit maps with often obscuring annotations and melting points and other numeric data as numbers whose meaning can only be interpreted from the context with clever text mining techniques – all this although the primary author had the original data and their meaning in hand in digital form which would allow for lossless replication and storage. Luckily, various attempts have recently been made to change this scenario. Open Standards for coding chemical information, such as the Chemical Markup Language (CML), have been published and journals such as those of the Royal Society of Chemistry start to publish chemical information from their recent articles in machine readable form. This talk gives an overview of the current developments in the field and how they will revolutionize the way in which we publish, access and also teach chemical information.
Categorised as: Open Science, Publishing
Too bad I won’t be there to see the talk – it sounds like it’ll be good.\n\nThe state-the-art for assembling experimental sections for papers is Microsoft Word. With a blunt instrument like that in charge of creating the world’s chemical data representations, how could we expect anything other than the current sorry state of affairs?\n\nThe first step in solving this problem seems obvious…