ChEMBL

The NAR Database Issue is currently in full flow, and there are many excellent articles; one important one for ChEMBL is this paper from the group of our good friend Nicolas Le Novere, at the EBI. It addresses a really important problem in biological and chemical data integration through the generation of unique and stable identifiers for records in a data collection – these are MIRIAM identifiers (MIRIAM is an acronym for Minimum Information Required in the Annotation of Models Registry (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/miriam). Identifiers.org is a new service (http://identifiers.org) that is built upon the information stored in the MIRIAM Registry and which provides directly resolvable identifiers, in the form of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Resources such as this are essential components for ad hoc, distributed queries across disparate data sources, and a core component for semantic web development. 

A link to the free pdf of the paper is here.

ChEMBL is in identifiers.org, give it a go!

%J Nucleic Acids Research
%D 2011
%O doi:10.1093/nar/gkr1097
%T Identifiers.org and MIRIAM Registry: community resources to provide persistent identification
%A N. Juty
%A N. Le Novere
%A C. Laibe