This is a presentation I gave today at Bio-IT 2014 here in Boston. I was in the company of a number of my favorite people to be o the agenda with… Steve Heller, Steve Boyer, Evan Bolton and Chris Southan.
The Importance of the InChI Identifier as a Foundation Technology for eScience Platforms at the Royal Society of Chemistry
The Royal Society of Chemistry hosts one of the largest online chemistry databases containing almost 30 million unique chemical structures. The database, ChemSpider, provides the underpinning for a series of eScience projects allowing for the integration of chemical compounds with our archive of scientific publications, the delivery of a reaction database containing millions of reactions as well as a chemical validation and standardization platform developed to help improve the quality of structural representations on the internet. The InChI has been a fundamental part of each of our projects and has been pivotal in our support of international projects such as the Open PHACTS semantic web project integrating chemistry and biology data and the PharmaSea project focused on identifying novel chemical components from the ocean with the intention of identifying new antibiotics. This presentation will provide an overview of the importance of InChI in the development of many of our eScience platforms and how we have used it specifically in the ChemSpider project to provide integration across hundreds of websites and chemistry databases across the web. We will discuss how we are now expanding our efforts to develop a Global Chemistry Network encompassing efforts in Open Source Drug Discovery and the support of data management for neglected diseases.