Posts tagged open

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.