Egon on SMILES InChI CML and RSS

The blogs ChemBark and KinasePro, have been some discussions on the use of SMILES, CML and InChI in Chemical Blogspace (with 70 chemistry blogs now!). Chemists seem to prefer SMILES over InChI, while there is interest in moving towards CML too. Peter commented.

PMR: 70 blogs is great. Go back a year and we’d have ca 10 I suspect. As I say I’m only looking for the 5-10% who are happy to be early adopters

Any incorporation of content other than images and free text requires some HTML knowledge, but this can be rather limited. It is up to us chemoinformaticians to write good documentation on how to do things; so here is a first go.

PMR: Yes, documentation is key as we are always being reminded! But we are also still fighting the browser technology. One of the great problems is that browsers have been a moving target for 12 years – it was almost easier to create a “plugin” in 1994 than now. How many of you can run Chime under Firefox?

Including CML in blogs and other RSS feedsI blogged about including CML in blogs last February, and can generally refer to this article published last year: Chemical markup, XML, and the World Wide Web. 5. Applications of chemical metadata in RSS aggregators (PMID:15032525, DOI:10.1021/ci034244p). Basically, it just comes down to putting the CML code into the HTML version of your blog content, though I appreciate the need for plugins.

PMR: you should always try to create XHTML (HTML with balanced tags). Unfortunately (and most regrettably) some tools, including WordPress, can often remove end tags.

Including SMILES, CAS and InChI in blogsIncluding SMILES is much easier as it is plain text, and has the advantage over InChI that it is much more readable. Chris wondered in th e KinasePro blog on how to tag SMILES, while Paul did the same on ChemBark about CAS numbers.

Now, users of PostGenomic.com know how to add markup to their blogs to get PostGenomic index discussed literature, website and conferences. Something similar is easily done for chemistry things too, as I showed in Hacking InChI support into postgenomic.com (which was put on lower priority because of finishing my PhD). PostGenomic.com basically uses microformats, which I blogged about just a few days ago in Chemo::Blogs #2, where I suggested the use of asperin.And this is the way SMILES, CAS and InChI’s can be tagged on blogs. The element is HTML code to indicate a bit of similar content in HTML, and can, among many other things, be formatted differently than other text. However, this can also be used to add semantics in a relatively cheap, but accepted, way. Microformats are formalized just by use, so whatever we, as chemistry bloggers, use will become the de facto standard. Here are my suggestions:

[snipped see Egon’s blog]

The RDFa alternativeThe future, however, might use RDFa over microformats, so here are the RDFa equivalents:

[snipped see Egon’s blog]

which requires you to register the namespace xmlns:chem=”http://www.blueobelisk.org/chemistryblogs/” somewhere though. Formally, the URN for this namespace needs to be formalized; Peter, would the Blue Obelisk be the platform to do this? BTW, this is more advanced, and currently does not have practical advantages over the use of microformats.