Presentation: Utilizing ChemSpider as a platform for education and exposure of student data to the community.

Educators and students now have access to rich internet resources of information. RSC’s ChemSpider is a community resource of structure-based chemistry delivering data including chemical compound collections, reaction synthesis procedures, physicochemical property and various forms of spectral data. ChemSpider offers the opportunity for the community to participate in populating, annotating and curating the data on ChemSpider. We believe that ChemSpider offers an opportunity for educators and students to participate in the ongoing development of a rich resource for the chemistry community. This presentation will suggest some potential uses of the ChemSpider website in terms of integrating into lesson plans. We will also outline how students can expose their structure and reaction-based research work via the ChemSpider platform for the benefit of the community and their online scientific reputation.

Presentation: ChemSpider – How An Online Resource of Chemical Compounds, Reaction Syntheses, and Property Data Can Support Green Chemistry

ChemSpider is an online database containing in excess of 20 million chemical compounds and associated experimental and predicted physicochemical data, reaction synthesis details and analytical data. A significant amount of the data contained within the database has been harvested and collated from a number of inventory systems and integrated to provide a centralized resource for the community. The ChemSpider database has the added benefit of being available for community deposition, annotation and curation. As a result it offers the potential for researchers to share their latest research with the public and participate in the creation of a rich resource of chemistry related information for the Green Chemistry community. This presentation will provide an overview of present capabilities and discuss the future vision for the platform.

Presentation: ChemSpider, how a free community resource of data can support teaching NMR spectroscopy

ChemSpider is an online database of chemical compounds, reaction syntheses and analytical data. Provided by the Royal Society of Chemistry, our intention is to provide a free internet resource of chemistry related data for the community. ChemSpider is unique in its role of allowing user depositions of chemical structures, synthesis procedures and analytical data and, in so doing, provides an environment for crowdsourced gathering of information. To date over 2000 1D and 2D NMR spectra have been deposited online by the community and are available for reuse. The data have been used as the basis of a spectral game whereby students can learn NMR by interacting with the data. This presentation will provide an overview of the tools and capabilities presently available on ChemSpider to support teaching NMR in the undergraduate curriculum and will outline how the community can participate in enriching this resource for the benefit of all.

Presentation: Enhancing discoverability across Royal Society of Chemistry content by integrating to ChemSpider, an online database of chemical structures

The ability to query across a chemistry publishers content using chemical structure searching can dramatically enhance discoverability. RSC has been applying a number of procedures to integrate RSC’s ChemSpider community resource with our published content and databases. These include: 1) entity extraction procedures 2) chemical name conversion procedures using software algorithms and curated dictionaries 3) semantic markup and 4) a crowdsourced curation processes. This presentation will provide an overview of the processes we have utilized in order to provide structure-based integration to RSC content. We will discuss our ongoing efforts to extend the approaches to the mining of data from the rich supplementary information sections of many RSC publications. Our intention is to provide access to synthesis procedures and analytical data and further enrich the ChemSpider database for the benefit of the chemistry community.

Poster: Utilizing ChemSpider as a platform for education and exposure of student data to the community

ChemSpider and SyntheticPages announce collaboration supporting synthetic chemistry

CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom., February 2nd, 2010 – The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) today announced the release of ChemSpider SyntheticPages^beta – a community resource of reaction synthesis procedures.

The launch of a beta site is the result of a collaboration between ChemSpider (the foremost and free online structure centric community for chemists) and the original SyntheticPages (www.syntheticpages.org). The partnership, which sees ChemSpider host the content from SyntheticPages, furthers their jointly held missions: to provide rich, high quality chemistry resources for the synthetic chemistry community.

A search of ChemSpider SyntheticPages^beta allows identification and detailing of the experimental procedures for the synthesis of specific chemical compounds. The database has been seeded with SyntheticPages.org data and will be expanded by inclusion of data from journal articles published by RSC. Researchers will also be able to deposit their own synthetic procedures to the site.

Using online semantic markup technologies and integrating to the ChemSpider database will allow interactive display of chemical structures, spectral data and a multitude of related data. Scientists can comment upon a growing resource of interactive synthetic processes, while leveraging the rich resources contained within the ChemSpider databases.

“We are very pleased to partner with SyntheticPages to provide a reaction database for the community. Students, teachers and researchers will have access to a free, highly curated database of synthetic procedures populated by curated depositions from the community and abstracted from RSC publications” commented Dr Antony Williams, Vice President of Strategic Development, ChemSpider.

He added “Our editorial board is made up of active synthetic organic chemists including the original founders of SyntheticPages. Their leadership and guidance will mesh our expertise in web-based technologies supporting semantic chemistry with deep knowledge and understanding of synthetic chemistry.”

Professors Kevin Booker-Milburn (University of Bristol), Stephen Caddick (University College London, UCL), Peter Scott (University of Warwick) and Dr Max Hammond are the original founders of SyntheticPages.

A spokesperson for the group commented “When we started, we believed that there was a place for an interactive database which would allow synthetic chemists who carry out reactions, to find procedures that work. Our aim is to develop a web-based resource that will be on every synthetic chemists’ desktop, and will be regularly used by experimentalists over the world. Our early work has set the stage to achieve this goal and we look forward to the collaboration with ChemSpider to develop a resource that will help sustain high quality synthetic chemistry worldwide”.

“We are particularly grateful to CEM Microwave Technology UK without whom we could not have developed SyntheticPages. We are also grateful to our thousands of members and users who have helped sustain the SyntheticPages endeavour and we look forward to even greater success with ChemSpider.’’

ChemSpider SyntheticPages^beta is released in beta form for feedback from the community at www.chemspider.com/syntheticpages .

For more information contact:

Dr Antony Williams
VP Strategic Development, ChemSpider
Royal Society of Chemistry
Thomas Graham House, Science Park, Milton Road
Cambridge CB4 0WF, UK
Tel: +1 919 201 1516
Email: williamsa@rsc.org

Notes for Editors

About the Royal Society of Chemistry

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is the largest organisation in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences. Supported by a worldwide network of 45,000 members and an international publishing business, our activities span education, conferences, science policy and the promotion of chemistry to the public.

www.rsc.org

About ChemSpider

ChemSpider offers a structure centric community for chemists to resource data. Offering access to almost 21.5 million unique chemical entities from over 200 data sources and by providing a platform for crowd sourced deposition, annotation and curation, it is the richest source of integrated chemistry information available online. ChemSpider delivers data and services to enable the semantic web for chemistry.

www.chemspider.com

About SyntheticPages

SyntheticPages is a freely available interactive database of synthetic chemistry for the dissemination of practical and reliable organic, organometallic and inorganic chemical synthesis, reactions and procedures deposited by synthetic chemists. Synthetic methods on the site are updated continuously by chemists working in academic and industrial research laboratories. Synthetic pages encourages submissions from graduate students, postdocs, industrialists and academics.

As anyone who runs a blog would likely tell you hosting a blog can take a lot of time and effort, especially if you are passionate about communicating. Fortunately, since ChemSpider was acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry we now have a lot more people involved with the platform including support staff and our colleagues in the Cambridge, UK-based Informatics team. Since we are working hard to further integrate various processes, systems and projects it makes sense that more of the team discussing our activities around ChemSpider can post here. In particular there are a number of activities going on regarding the technical aspects of ChemSpider development that will start to show up on this blog and we encourage your participation, comments and feedback. ChemSpider is, after all, about community participation so do engage us!

Over the next few days a number of my colleagues will introduce themselves to the readers of this blog. I welcome them all to the “honor and the burden”…it’s a pleasure to share this space with them.

We unveiled the ability to embed chemical structure images as well as embedding spectra last year. Now there are multiple blogs using the embed functionality, structures are starting to show up on Wikipedia and our web services are being used for structure image retrieval. We encourage you to make use of the resources we are delivering and any feedback.

It’s excellent because by time I had finished watching this I was both excited and confused. Confused because how could I not of heard of this experiment. Even if it was to work why were those spheres so big and uniform? Excited because I’d been looking for some good kitchen chemistry to do with my kids and this would be a great example. I couldn’t really get my head around how the observations were working but on a rushed grocery expedition prior to going into ScienceOnline2010 #scio10 this part weekend I threw everything necessary into the grocery basket to repeat the experiment.

At ScienceOnline2010 I was involved in a number of discussions, as usual, regarding data quality, curation and assertions….this being based on my experience with curating the ChemSpider database. Today I sat in on a discussion entitled “Getting the Science Right: The importance of fact checking mainstream science publications — an underappreciated and essential art — and the role scientists can and should (but often don’t) play in it – Rebecca Skloot, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and David Dobbs.” it was an interesting exchange with comments such as “newspapers and magazines don’t check facts” and the urban myth that a one minute kiss burns 26 calories while the fact is that a Hershey’s Kiss contains 26 calories.

Post ScienceOnline2010 I got home this afternoon to find my kids desperately wanting to do kitchen chemistry so, with pessimism I started to work through the experiment with them. They mixed and stirred and cooled and heated. They got to see a lot fizzing and to see crystals grow which they thought was great. It of course failed dismally as it has for many other people, including this guy, but they had a great time. In parallel I was doing some fact-checking to see whether or not to prepare them for disappointment.

There have been a lot of exchanges online about this topic of water marbles with chemists exchanging concepts about the science behind it if it did work. See here for example. The video has gone viral across many sites. Very impressive for a hoax really…and it did get me interested in doing kitchen chemistry. The truth is a lot easier though…and still good chemistry! Watch Steve Spangler in action below…

The polymer beads can be bought here.

There’s more Kitchen Chemistry to come but I think I’ll stick to some of Theodore Gray’s guidance …maybe time for some Mad Science at home…