IUPAC/InChI joins the Microsoft BioIT Alliance

Thursday, September 20, 2007

On the CHMINF-L mailing list it was reported that the IUPAC InChI/InChIKey project joins Microsoft BioIT Alliance. Quoting:

The establishment of the BioIT Alliance in April 2006 by Microsoft and leading organizations in the life science industries was very much a reflection of this scenario, and the Alliance has now been extended to include a major Scientific Union, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). The importance of IUPACs contribution to the enterprise lies primarily in the responsibility of this organization for establishing standards for transmitting chemical information.

I am political quite illiterate, and have no idea why the BioIT Alliance could not use InChI or InChIKey without this mashup. However, I am comforted in the knowledge that the IUPAC InChI/InChIKey project will make sure the Microsoft will not use the InChIKey as drug identifier, which would give very nice (but letal) Millenium-bug like situations when that unlike key clash was found ;)

10.000 chemistry blog posts!

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Chemical blogspace is about to hit the 10.000 blog post since the start less than a year ago! Cheers to all bloggers!

Clean up of RSS feeds

Saturday, August 25, 2007

The number of registered RSS feeds are slightly below 150 chemistry oriented blogs; a number of them have ceased to exist, or moved to a different host, or simply changed URL. I just spent an hour or so, debugging these changes, as the Cb software does not really report that. But things are now updated again.

cb.openmolecules.net DNS problem?

Friday, August 17, 2007

In an attempt to get rdf.openmolecules.net online, it seems that the DNS system got confused; At least, the cb.openmolecules.net server is not reachable... more on this soon.

Update: OK, the DNS seems to be updated, maybe fixed itself, or some propagation problem. Anyway, now the MySQL server has gone down. So, still no running Cb :(

RDF in Chemical blogspace

Thursday, August 9, 2007

I have been playing with RDF-ing molecular space a bit, and results are getting slowly in shape:



This screenshot shows the HTML created for this RDF file on the fly by the web browser. The current version extracts information from Chemical blogspace and ChEBI (not much yet, though :).

The molecule pages in Chemical blogspace link to this RDF, and that's really what I wanted to show right now:



Why I do this? Among others, give me all boiling points for some compound with one (SPARQL) query, instead of having to browse several web resources manually. Oh, BTW, the HTML view of the RDF document uses chemical RDFa.

Userscripts you forget about...

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Peter writes about a Greasemonky userscript pop up:

What are the Pg and Cb all over the TOC. When you bring up the page they aren’t there! What’s happened? Well the chemical blogosphere has posted about several articles here and mentioned their DOIs. The Blue Obelisk has developed a Gresemonkey script (which is a Firefox plugin) which reads the TOC and sees if any DOIs have been mentioned in the Chemical Blogosphere. And, in this case, three articles have been.

This is the screenshot he made:

For the obligatory statistics: Cb now discusses 1184 articles. Because I have trouble accessing the Postgenomic website, I cannot give that number :(

The rise of Chemical blogspace

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

The Chem Blog wrote about WTF is up with the Science blogosphere?, discussing a podcast on the chemical blogosphere, and wondering why it is larger than that of other natural science fields and mathematics. It is surprising indeed, because chemists generally are very conservative when it comes to anything to do with a monitor, mouse and keyboard. The argument put forward in the podcast is that there are a few strong voices amongst our blogs.

I am hoping the Chemical blogspace helps a bit too here. With about 40 unique users a day it is somewhat lower than it has been before the move to the new server, which was around 60 visitors each day, but I am sure this will recover.

The number of chemistry related blogs is rather large indeed, and the Cb counter is at over 136 now. Not every blog is equally active, but both the absolute number of entries and the number of active blogs per week are continuously increasing:


Interestingly, the blog had a very nice plot of the blogosphere interconnectivity. It is good practice to link to many other blogs and resources in ones entries, to keep discussions going, provide further information etc. Like Peter I was hoping that the plot would refer the Chemical blogspace, but it does not. This interconnectivity information is available from the Cb database, and I will try to create such a plot.