RSC & ChemZoo developing tools to help chemists label compounds with standard tags

The information below is an edited version of the item from Knowledgespeak Newsletter

RSC news item Web chemistry progresses InChI by InChI in Chemistry World

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and ChemZoo, a US-based software firm, are developing tools to help chemists label their own compounds with a standard computer-readable tag. A beta form of the InchI resolver is expected to be on display in March.

The standard way to represent chemical structures using a string of text, the International Chemical Identifier (InChI), was developed several years ago but is unused, even unknown, by many chemists.

The free 'resolver' would turn any InChI into a shorter 25-letter code (the 'InChI key') seen to be friendlier to search engines.

There is disagreement over what impact the collaboration could have on current gold standards in managing chemical information, such as the ACS' subscription-only Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). The ACS service allots compounds a CAS number and catalogues them using its own proprietary informatics platform. CAS holds some 40 million organic and inorganic substances in its registry - roughly double ChemSpider's existing database.

A comment "Five Questions about the InChI Resolver" posted on the blog Depth-First: walking the web of chemical informatics.