As follow up on my Including SMILES, CML and InChI in blogs blog last week, I had a go at Greasemonkey. Some time ago already, Flags and Lollipops and Nodalpoint showed with two cool mashups (one Connotea/Postgenomic and one Pubmed/Postgenomic) that userscripts are rather useful in science too. I can very much recommend the PubMed/Postgenomic mashup, as PubMed has several organic chemistry journals indexed too!

I just found out that a review article that I wrote earlier this year got printed: Molecular Chemometrics (DOI:10.1080/10408340600969601), with my personal view on the interplay between chemoinformatics and chemometrics.

The blogs ChemBark and KinasePro have been discussing the use of SMILES, CML and InChI in Chemical Blogspace (with 70 chemistry blogs now!). Chemists seem to prefer SMILES over InChI, while there is interest in moving towards CML too. Peter commented. Any incorporation of content other than images and free text requires some HTML knowledge, but this can be rather limited.

Peter blogged about the h-index, which is a measure for ones scientific impact. He used Google Scholar, but I do not feel that that database is clean enough. I believe a better source would be the ISI Web-of-Science. Therefore, I composed a list of h-indices of my own, ordered by value.

Because no one picked up my Chemo::Blogs suggestion, I will now officially claim the blog series title. However, unlike the original Bio::Blogs series, I will not summarize interesting blogs, but just spam you with websites I recently marked as toblog on del.icio.us. Semantics and Text Mining Evan Prodromou wrote about RDFa vs microformats.

Contributions to open data do not have to be large, as long as many people are doing it. The Wikipedia is a good example, and PubChem accepts contributions of small databases too (I think). The result can still be large and rather useful, even scientifically.

Recently I discussed JUnit testing from within Eclipse , and blogged at several occasions about it in other situations. I cannot stress enough how useful unit testing is: it adds this extra set of eyeballs to make bugs shallow. And it does that, indeed. Ensuring that you actually test all the code you write, however, is not easy.

Just some short quites note about the third day (see day 1 and 2 ). Today’s program of the German Conference on Chemoinformatics started with a presentation by Rzepa about his work on a semantic wiki (DOI:10.1021/ci060139e), which might be online here. (He recorded a podcast, but I have not seen it online yet.) I wish I could see the sources of those wiki pages, to see how that system integrates RDF, but at least Jmol is running fine.

The 2nd German Conference on Chemoinformatics started yesterday, with two chemoinformatics tutorials: one on industrial chemoinformatics (I saw this presentation before… not sure when), with a good overview on integrating different information sources;

Paul Bracher and Joshua Finkelstein pointed my attention to a nice discussion in Nature on the future of chemistry, in What Chemists Want to Know, by Philip Ball. Paul and Joshua already reviewed it thoroughly, but I could not resist commenting in it too.

Open source chemoinformatics has become a common phenomenon, though many projects are small in nature: source code is developed by only few developers, or even in a closed manner and released when considered done.