Chemistry Central Blog
Open source organic dictionary created
An open source dictionary of organic chemistry has recently been compiled for word processors.
The dictionary, hosted by ChemSpy, was put together by Adam Azman - student in the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - who decided to create his own because of the lack availability of free chemical dictionaries.
The dictionary, which can be downloaded on the ChemSpy site, is in a standard “.dic” format, and so can be opened in NotePad to view - and if desired, edit - the entire content. Instructions for installing it on Microsoft Word OpenOffice can be found in the download together with licensing information - the dictionary is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution License.
As Azman concedes, further improvements will be needed to the 18,000-word resource, such as in eliminating some misspellings and including UK spellings. To help expand the dictionary's content, ChemSpider has also provided 'many hundreds of thousands of chemical names and terms' that can be harvested from. The project highlights yet another interesting open source avenue that scientists are pursuing.
Posted by Gino D'Oca at 16:21 Comments (1)
Posted by ChemSpiderMan on March 10, 2008 at 12:56 PM GMT #