Say, you have your own dictionary of chemical compounds. For example, like your company’s list of yet-unpublished internal research codes. Still, you want to index your local listserv to make it easier for your employees to search for particular chemistry you are working on and perhaps related to something done at other company sites. This is what Oscar is for.

One goal of my three month project is to take Oscar4 to the community. We want to get it used more, and we need a larger development community. Oscar4 and the related technologies do a good, sometimes excellent, job, but have to be maintained, just like any other piece of code. To make using it easier, we are developing new APIs, as well as two user-oriented applications: a Taverna 2 plugin , and command line utilities.

Last month I reported a few things I missed in CiteULike. One of them was support for CiTO (see doi:10.1186/2041-1480-1-S1-S6), a great Citation Typing Ontology.

Besides getting Oscar used by ChEBI (hopefully via Taverna ), my main task in my three month Oscar project is to refactor things to make it more modular, and remove some features no longer needed (e.g. an automatically created workspace environment). Clearly, I need to define a lot of new unit tests to ensure my assumptions on how to code works are valid.

One of the goals of my project in Cambridge is to make Oscar available as Taverna plugin (source code, Hudson build). I have progressed somewhat, but still struggling with getting the update site working.

As Peter announced in his blog, and I tweeted earlier, I have started as postdoctoral research associate in Peter’s group at the University of Cambridge, to work the next three months on Oscar, a chemical text mining tool. My tasks will focus on programmatical plumbing instead of method development, and I am aiming at integration with CDK-Taverna (see doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-159, and which is currently being ported to Taverna 2.2 by Andreas).

AJCann posted a blog today about what he doesn’t like about Mendeley. Abhishek replied that he does not like people complain about one tool, instead of pointing out a good alternative. Mendeley has two alternatives, Zotero and CiteULike (there is also Connotea, but got behind in evolution).

I have blogged about two Molecular Chemometrics principles so far:

I noted earlier this week that [d]uring the week [in Oxford ], someone (name and address is know at the editorial office) commented on the fact that my blog posts are somewhat difficult to follow; that is, it’s often not clear why I am posting what I am posting.

The meetings in and around Oxford were great! I already wrote that the Predictive Toxicology workshop was brilliant (see Oxford… #1 ) and Oxford… #2 ), but I also very, very much enjoyed meeting up with Dan and Nico! During the week, someone (name and address is know at the editorial office) commented on the fact that my blog posts are somewhat difficult to follow; that is, it’s often not clear why I am posting what I am posting.

The Predictive Toxicology meeting is over. It was a great meeting, by any standard. Very much recommended, and many thanx to Barry for the organization! The meeting was a true workshop, with a mix of presentations and getting work done. I participated in a group that looked at mutagenicity of potential anti-malaria drugs from the datasets of GSK and Novartis recently release as Open Data.