Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a hand-held device is already available and will increase in coverage [92, 93].
The promise of the Semantic Web will soon be delivered and an increasing
number of public databases will become available. Integrated access to these
data will be delivered soon after as resources such as ChemSpider mesh them
into their services.
ChemSpider will likely continue to grow in importance as one of the primary
free chemistry portals on the Internet. The number of compounds will con-
tinue to grow daily as additional publishers choose to participate in contribut-
ing to free structure-based discoverability by exposing their data. ChemSpider
will expand from handling explicit chemical compounds to the support of
compounds that cannot be represented by a specifi c connection table. As a
result support will improve for organometallics, polymers, minerals, and other
ambiguous compounds and generally expanding the coverage for this Internet
portal for chemistry.
22.4
CONCLUSION
ChemSpider is probably one of the most successful examples of a project initi-
ated by a small group of experts to address perceived issues with the integra-
tion and assimilation of masses of public data. As a result of out-of-the-box
thinking and utilizing minimal resources other than intellect, willpower, and
commitment to solve the problem, a small team innovated a solution to build
a structure-centric database. Such a model could be readily applied elsewhere
as an example of community collaboration for the benefi t of all.
During the development of ChemSpider we were disparaged in the blogo-
sphere [94] and had to respond accordingly [95]. Despite numerous grant
applications to source funding to support ChemSpider development, we were
unsuccessful. Nevertheless, ChemSpider fl ourished and received the active
support of a community of users, depositors, and curators such that the system
was soon responding to over 100,000 transactions per day for a system hosted
out of a basement on a skeleton platform of three servers, two of them hand
built, and via standard cable Internet. Now owned and hosted by the Royal
Society of Chemistry, ChemSpider continues on its mission to provide one of
the central Internet portals for chemistry, providing access to millions of chemi-
cal structures integrated to hundreds of online data sources. The true collabora-
tive benefi ts of platforms such as ChemSpider will be felt as the multitude of
online resources are integrated into federated searches and Semantic Web
linking in a manner that single queries can be distributed across the myriad of
resources to provide answers through a single interface. As these systems are
established, the quality of results returned will become more important to
reduce the sense of overwhelm and a few trusted resources will naturally
become recognized for the quality of data provided. The active engagement of
the community to provide crowdsourced fi ltering and validation of the data will
likely establish such resources as the primary trusted platforms as is already in
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