ChEMBL

As you may have picked up from a couple of recent posts, one of my current "skunk works" projects is trying to use Social Media to open up chemical data - given my interest in naming stuff, I've called this chinterest - a sort of Pinterest for Chemistry (please don't register the Internet domain name, we may want to use it in the future). So I've set up an album on Picasa that will be open with all the images of interesting chemical structures I come across at the forthcoming ACS National Meeting in New Orleans - I'm personally interested in drug discovery, so they will tend to be med. chem. type things that are covered, but it will just be me, so I won't get everything, but it will be a real world test of the approach of grabbing images and putting stuff out there in sort of real time. The ACS is not a renown meeting for first time disclosures, so there won't be a lot of "extra fresh" stuff I'm sure.

I have an iPhone 5, so the camera is pretty good on this, but I am old, so shake a little. We will see what the images are like. Closer to the meeting, I will post links to the image stream.

I will try and encourage some of the "ChEMBL Elves"^* to process the images into real 2D structures, InChIs, etc. and we'll look at the error rate.

I will need to check the terms and conditions of the meeting to make sure that I'm allowed to take photos - but I could draw stuff on a notebook and photo that, and attendance at the meeting isn't covered by an NDA - so I'm pretty sure it will be fine - the action will also not be problematic wrt copyright. But if I'm expelled from the meeting I'll make sure my one call is to you all on twitter!

I looked at a number of picture upload sites, and settled on Picasa due to the ability to open everything up, flexible annotation, and reasonable privacy terms. Pinterest - on who the chinterest name is a homage is quite shocking with it's terms and conditions.

jpo

^* "ChEMBL Elves" are small beings that seem to live on our campus - you leave some unfinished scientific work on your desk when you leave, and in the morning it's magically done. One problem with them though is that they are unfortunately useless at financial reporting, writing activity reports, etc.