Following on from my presentation regarding text-mining and document mark-up at the ACS meeting in Philly it was interesting to see the announcement about the Chem4Word project from Microsoft. In collaboration with the Unilever School of Informatics at Cambridge university, and specifically working with Peter Murray-Rust and some of his team. From the website announcement it states: “Microsoft Research is investigating the introduction of chemistry-related features in Microsoft Office Word, including authoring and semantic annotations. Our approach to chemistry authoring will be modeled after the mathematic equation authoring in Word 2007 and will leverage many of the user-interface and XML extensibility options that are provided by Office 2007.
The goal of the Chem4Word project is to enable similar authoring, display, and mining scenarios for chemistry-related information within Office Word. Specifically, we aim to:
- Provide easy authoring of chemical information within Microsoft Office Word 2007 documents
- Allow end-user denotation of inline “chemical zones”
- Render high-quality, print-ready visual depictions of chemical structures
- Store and expose chemical information in a semantically rich manner to support publishing and mining scenarios, for authors, readers, publishers, and other vendors across the broad chemical information community”
This will be very useful in terms of supporting our efforts to enable the publication process for chemists and we will be watching this project with interest and hope to be engaged in early testing if we are invited.
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