Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
22.1
INTRODUCTION
Accessing information about chemicals distributed across the Internet is, in
many ways, too easy. Chemists simply type in the name of a chemical of inter-
est into a search engine and then wade through the results hoping to fi nd a
result matching their query. Such approaches are limited to the whims of text-
based matching, and it can be very time consuming to wade through pages of
results attempting to segregate the various types of information retrieved.
Many of these searches will, in any case, retrieve hits from public compound
databases having variable quality, from those that manually curate each entry
to those that are simply repositories of data. The identifi cation of the chemical
structure associated with a particular chemical can be almost intractable, and
the quality of data associated with chemical compounds in online databases
varies from questionable to valueless. Until recently there has been no real
attempt to unify and integrate the public chemistry resources online and only
one platform, ChemSpider, is taking on the challenge.
ChemSpider is a free online structure database developed with the inten-
tion of aggregating and linking chemical structure-based information and data
across the Internet. Containing more than 25 million unique chemical entities
and linked out to over 400 data sources, ChemSpider offers the ability to
perform
both
text- and structure-based searches to resource information such
as chemical vendors, properties, analytical data, patents, publications, and a
myriad of other information [1, 2]. While enabling this broad form of searching
for chemical data across the Internet, ChemSpider has also assumed a key role
in allowing the community to expand and improve the online data by provid-
ing a platform for community deposition, annotation, and curation. As a result
the ChemSpider website has become a crowdsourcing environment for chem-
ists to expose their own activities to the community and participate in creating
the richest single resource for chemistry-related information available online
and, in keeping with the nature of the Web, for free. In 2009 the Royal Society
of Chemistry (RSC) acquired ChemSpider to fulfi ll its objective of disseminat-
ing knowledge to the chemical community and advancing the chemical sci-
ences. In partnership, RSC and ChemSpider will provide innovative services
on a reliable infrastructure to service the chemical community and bring new,
exciting opportunities for publishing and cheminformatics that will radically
improve the online research environment.
22.2
PUBLIC COMPOUND DATABASES
Over the past few years efforts have been made to deliver “public compound
databases” to the community to allow access to data relating to chemical
compounds. These databases can contain from a few hundred to tens of mil-
lions of chemical structures with associated information and may be focused
on drugs, metabolites, or pesticides or simply aggregate repositories of data
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