Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5). A typical blog combines text, images and links to other blogs, web
pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave
comments and interact with the author is an important component of blogs.
Similar approaches for comment posting are being adopted by publishers now
[23, 24] as well as by the Royal Society of Chemistry in its deployment of
ChemSpider SyntheticPages platform [25], a community resource of synthe-
tic procedures (
vide infra
). The number of chemistry-related blogs continues
to grow. There are blogs from members of the pharmaceutical industry, the
cheminformatics world, the open-source chemistry software world, and other
willing participants in the “ blogosphere, ” specifi cally students. Some of these
blogs are very rich in chemistry, for example, Org Prep Daily [26] and
TotallySynthetic [27]. In addition, communities such as ResearchGate [28],
Science3.0 [29], and Friendfeed communities such as LifeScientists [30]
are increasingly becoming active communities for collaboration and
communication.
The short list provided above is meant to be representative of the types of
resources that are becoming increasingly available online as individuals,
researchers, and organizations contribute to the data available via the Internet.
These resources, as well as many more available online, are proving to be very
valuable for collaboration. In terms of discoverability, chemistry in the form
of chemical compounds, and reactions, searches are limited to text-based
searches, and it is diffi cult to source information from a single search of the
Internet linking these sources together. In order to provide a unifi ed approach
to searching across these multiple diverse resources via a single search engine,
ChemSpider was developed.
22.2.6
Chem S pider
ChemSpider [31] was initially developed as a hobby project by this author and
a small team of voluntary programmers simply to contribute to the chemistry
community. ChemSpider is built primarily on commercial software using a
Microsoft technology platform of asp.NET and SQL Server as this allowed
ease of implementation and projected longevity and made best use of available
skill sets. Following a short development cycle of just a few months ChemSpider
was released to the public in March 2007 with the lofty goal of “building a
structure centric community for chemists.”
The database content, more than 25 million structures from over 400 data
sources, has been aggregated as a result of contributions and depositions from
chemical vendors, commercial database vendors, government databases, pub-
lishers, members of the Open Notebook Science community [32], and indi-
vidual scientists [33, 34]. The database can be queried using structure/
substructure searching and alphanumeric text searching of chemical names
and both intrinsic as well as predicted molecular properties. Various searches
have been added to the system to cater to various user personae, including
mass spectrometrists and medicinal chemists. For example, mass spectrome-
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