Biomedical Engineering Reference
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articles to the Utopia platform [21], see Chapter 15 by Pettifer and
collegues for more details on this innovative scientifi c literature tool. The
development of the RSC semantic markup platform owes much of its
success to the availability of the open source software components,
developed by a team of innovative scientists and software developers,
and these are now used in parallel with both in-house and commercial
closed source software to deliver the best capabilities.
3.3 ChemSpider
ChemSpider [22] was initially developed on a shoestring budget as a
hobby project, by a small team, simply to contribute a free resource to
the chemistry community. Released at the American Chemical Society
(ACS) Spring meeting in Chicago in March 2007, it was seeded with just
over 10 million chemicals sourced from the PubChem database [23].
Following a two-year period of expanding the database content to over
20 million chemicals, adding new functionality to the system to facilitate
database curation and crowd-sourced depositions of data, as well as the
development of a series of related projects, ChemSpider was acquired by
the Royal Society of Chemistry [2]. The original strategic vision of
providing a structure-centric community for chemistry was expanded to
become the world's foremost free access chemistry database and to make
subsets of the data available as open data.
The database content in ChemSpider (see Figure 3.2), now over
26 million structures aggregated from over 400 data sources, has been
developed as a result of contributions and depositions from chemical
vendors, commercial database vendors, government databases,
publishers, members of the Open Notebook Science community and
individual scientists. 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, for example, mass spectrometrists and medicinal
chemists. ChemSpider is very fl exible in its applications and nature of
available searches.
The primary ChemSpider architecture is built on commercial software
using a Microsoft technology platform of ASP.NET and SQL Server
2005/2008 as at inception, it allowed for ease of implementation,
projected longevity and made best use of available skill sets. Early
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