Posts tagged data

Antony Williams presented “ChemSpider: Does Community Engagement Work to Build a Quality Online Resource for Chemists?” at the 242nd American Chemical Society National Meeting today.  This is just one of his five presentations on ChemSpider this week.  He noted at the end of the session that the presentation will be on his SlideShare page soon.

In the presentation, he noted that he has supposedly written two books according to Amazon.  One is Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research, and the other is I Hate Sex, but there may be some author disambiguation in this case.  Maybe there is another Anthony J. Williams?

Throughout the presentation, he noted how much you can’t trust data from many supposedly reputable sources, but the staff at ChemSpider work to double and triple check their sources.  They work with about 400 outside suppliers of chemical data, and many data points do not match up.  Many data suppliers get their data from other sources, so often times errors can be repeated because of simple redundancy. 

Letting “the crowd” fix errors doesn’t really work because the interested crowd in chemistry is pretty small.

He mentions many other interesting projects such as the Spectral Game,  SpectraSchool, Open PHACTS, and the ChemSpider Synthetic Pages.  To date, they have only had a little over 130 people contribute to this freely available interactive database of synthetic chemistry, and they would like more people to be submit their data.

If you want more information on Antony Williams, you can also follow him on his twitter account or read his personal blog.

If yes, you are in luck.  Today, they updated their “Data Management & Sharing Frequently Asked Questions” page. 

Good news from the APS.

The American Physical Society (APS) is making available to researchers two data sets based on our journals Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, and Reviews of Modern Physics. This corpus comprises over 450,000 articles and dates back to 1893; its size and extent make it attractive for use in research about networks and the social aspects of science. The first data set consists of all pairings of articles in which one article cites another within the collection. The second set contains basic metadata about each article in the collection. Researchers may learn more about the data sets and request access to them by visiting http://publish.aps.org/datasets.

Here are some interesting things concerning data curation in the sciences.

• There is a Microsoft book entitled the Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, “presenting the first broad look at the rapidly emerging field of data-intensive science.”
• The recent IATUL conference at Purdue covered a lot of great topics.
• This is a good presentation at SlideShare by Michael Day.
• This article also does a good job of explaining what data curation is.

“The Open Science Grid aims to promote discovery and collaboration in data-intensive research by providing a computing facility and services that integrate distributed, reliable and shared resources to support computation at all scales.”

This is “supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.”

“Open Data Commons exists to provide legal solutions for open data. In March 2008 it launched the first ever open data license: the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL). Open Data Commons is an Open Knowledge Foundation project run by its Advisory Council and like the Foundation is a not-for-profit effort working for the benefit of the general open knowledge community.”

From the blog post — Dangerous Data: Lessons from my Cheminfo Retrieval Class

“If I did my job correctly they should have learned that no sources should be trusted implicitly. Unfortunately squeezing useful information from chemistry sources is a lot of work and hopefully they learned some tools and attitudes that will prove helpful no matter how chemistry data is delivered in the future.” Later, Jean-Claude Bradley said…

“As long as scientists don’t provide - and are not required to provide by publishers - the full experimental details recorded in their lab notebooks, this type of uncertainty will continue to plague science and make the communication of knowledge much more difficult than it need be.”