Chemistry Central Blog
Friday Feb 01, 2008
eChemistry project gets Microsoft funding
It was recently announced that Microsoft is to fund the two year eChemistry pilot project, whose aim will be to explore digital library technology in the hope of demonstrating the benefits to chemists of online, open access data. The work is a collaborative effort comprising chemists and computer scientists from eight bodies: Microsoft Research, PubChem, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the universities of Cambridge, Southampton (UK), Cornell, Indiana, and Penn state (USA).
The project seeks to
merge chemistry and the Cornell University-based Open Archives Initiative 'Object Reuse and
Exchange Project' (OAI-ORE), which aims at 'developing
standardized, interoperable, and machine-readable mechanisms to express
information about compound information objects on the web'. In short, the OAI-ORE, whose model protocols are to be officially
outlined in March,
sees 'the future as composed of a large number of interoperating repositories
rather than monolithic databases', therefore allowing search engines to gather
data from a wide range of disperate machine-readible sources, thus transforming
the way in which scientific research is shared.
The eChemistry project was chosen as an
exemplar to help demonstrate that the OAI-ORE standards
are of use to scientists. The study will involve searching and indexing existing online databases and
print archives, and determining how best to record chemistry data captured in
laboratory experiments. The results will then be hosted by PubChem and other
repositories, as Peter Murray Rust, eChemistry participant from Cambridge University, states: "...we shall be able to create a
number of well-populated molecular repositories with heterogeneous content
(everything from crystallography to Wikipedia chemicals for example). One that
we are currently developing is an RDF/CML-based repository of common chemicals -
perhaps 5000 - which could serve as an amanuensis for the bench chemist or
undergraduate needing reference material."
The funding support is a
further boost for proponents of open access to chemical data and research, especially in light of the fact that the 'chemistry community' is
still less cognizant of the OA concept than researchers in some other disciplines, a
point reiterated by Lee Dirks, Microsoft Research's head of
scholarly communications.
Posted by Gino D'Oca at 12:15 Comments (0)
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