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Abstract
There is an increasing availability of free and open access resources for chemists
to use on the internet. Coupled with the increasing availability of Open Source software
tools we are in the middle of a revolution in data availability and tools to manipulate
these data. ChemSpider is a free access website for chemists built with the intention
of providing a structure centric community for chemists. It was developed with the
intention of aggregating and indexing available sources of chemical structures and
their associated information into a single searchable repository and making it available
to everybody, at no charge.
There are tens if not hundreds of chemical structure databases such as literature
data, chemical vendor catalogs, molecular properties, environmental data, toxicity
data, analytical data etc. and no single way to search across them. Despite the fact
that there were a large number of databases containing chemical compounds and data
available online their inherent quality, accuracy and completeness was lacking in
many regards. The intention with ChemSpider was to provide a platform whereby the
chemistry community could contribute to cleaning up the data, improving the quality
of data online and expanding the information available to include data such as reaction
syntheses, analytical data, experimental properties and linking to other valuable
resources. It has grown into a resource containing over 21 million unique chemical
structures from over 200 data sources.
ChemSpider has enabled real time curation of the data, association of analytical data
with chemical structures, real-time deposition of single or batch chemical structures
(including with activity data) and transaction-based predictions of physicochemical
data. The social community aspects of the system demonstrate the potential of this
approach. Curation of the data continues daily and thousands of edits and depositions
by members of the community have dramatically improved the quality of the data relative
to other public resources for chemistry.
This presentation will provide an overview of the history of ChemSpider, the present
capabilities of the platform and how it can become one of the primary foundations
of the semantic web for chemistry. It will also discuss some of the present projects
underway since the acquisition of ChemSpider by the Royal Society of Chemistry.