You may have noticed that Chempedia is now offline, replaced by a proxy page. The service is being radically redesigned in response to feedback from many individuals over the last year or so. The Web has created unprecedented opportunities for rethinking scientific publication; the goal is to use Chempedia as an adaptable resource for advancing this idea.

It’s been over two years since Thirty-Two Free Chemistry Databases first appeared here. The popularity of this resource has far exceeded my expectations, and continues to be one of the most highly-viewed articles on Depth-First. But a lot has changed in the intervening two years. Many new services have appeared. Old services have evolved.

Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Sieh dir dieses Video auf www.youtube.com an oder aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein sollte. And on a more serious note….

The database backends for both Zusammen and the Metamolecular Product Blog started out as SQLite databases during development. If you’re not familiar with SQLite, it’s a fast, single-file, zero-administration database system. And it works very well in some cases, such as when you’re developing a Web application. But deployment is another matter. In Rails, for example, the SQLite database file lives inside your project directory.

As you can see from the GitHub log, work on MX, the cross-platform, cross-language cheminformatics toolkit, is currently centered around adding support for complex structure queries with query atoms and query bonds. Although this is not a SMARTS system, the net result would the same - more control over structure queries. The reason for this focus has to do with a commonly used, but not always implemented substructure searching idiom.

To kickoff its new Product Blog, Metamolecular is now offering ChemWriter Domain Licenses for US$299 through the month of March. ChemWriter is the chemical structure editor for Web applications. It runs on all modern operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and all modern browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

Does this sound like any large scientific/professional organizations you know?

Over at Zusammen, a post on open notebook science and the least publishable unit drew some interesting comments. Jean-Claude Bradley introduced the term “micropublication”, which seems to describe the concept very well. A follow-up article explores the background and requirements for a workable micropublication system in chemistry. Many of the points apply to any experimental science.

Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Sieh dir dieses Video auf www.youtube.com an oder aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein sollte. Following on from the last post in which the Semantic Web was described in plain english, here’s this video, which does the same thing for RDF.