Improving online chemistry one structure at a time

RSC|ChemSpider is one of the world’s largest online resources for chemistry related data and services. Developed with the intention of delivering access to structure-based chemistry data via the internet the ChemSpider platform hosts over 26 million unique chemical compounds aggregated from over 400 data sources and provides an environment for the community to both annotate and curate these existing data as well as deposit new data to the system. The search system delivers flexible querying capabilities together with links to external sites for publication and patent data. ChemSpider has spawned a number of projects include ChemSpider SyntheticPages for hosting openly peer-reviewed chemical synthesis articles. This presentation will review the present capabilities of the ChemSpider system providing direct examples of how to use the system to source high quality data of value to pharmaceutical companies. We will discuss some of the challenges associated with validating data quality, examine how ChemSpider is a part of the semantic web for chemistry and investigate approaches to using ChemSpider integrated to analytical instrumentation.