Managing Information News| XML Architecture Provides New Way Of Publishing Chemical Information

Managing Information News| XML Architecture Provides New Way Of Publishing Chemical Information: "A commentary article published recently in the Open Access journal BMC Bioinformatics argues that it is time chemistry followed in the footsteps of bioinformatics and structural biology and moved towards the creation of an open semantic web facilitating access to chemical information.

In the article, Peter Murray-Rust, from the University of Cambridge (UK) and John Mitchell and Henry Rzepa from Imperial College London (UK) argue using three case studies that conventional methods such as cutting-and-pasting chemical information are time-consuming and introduce errors.

The authors argue in favour an open XML architecture linking to connection tables or open databases such as PubChem, to identify chemical compounds mentioned in the biomedical literature. This comes as additional support for open chemical databases like the NIH's PubChem, which is currently at the centre of a legal battle between the NIH and the American Chemical Society (ACS). The ACS runs the very lucrative Chemical Abstracts Service and is directly threatened by public databases.
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