An obvious requirement for the chemical semantic web is that we have chemistry – non-trivial as most is in walled-gardens. But things have really moved in the last hour. I left a message on Martin Walker’s Talk on WP, then at lunch met two of the semantic wiki-people – Chris Bizer who is creating dbpedia and Denny V who is creating a semantic chemistry Wiki in Karlsruhe. By the end of lunch Martin replied as below:
So now they are all in touch and will work out a way that chemistry infoboxes on WP can be extracted into RDF. That will be sensational. It will give everyone a semantic chemistry handbook. You’ll be able to search it with the next generation of RDF tools – these are no longer vapourware. TimBL has a “tabulator” which can browse a RDF triple collection, fetching from the web where necessary. There are many other tools, and people are looking for content for them. So chemistry could be an exciting demonstration.
At the same time we are looking at Nick Day’s RSS feeds from CrystalEye and it looks like these are great starting places for SPARQL et al.
May 11th, 2007 at 7:45 pm eAs far as I can tell, there are around 3000 compounds with chemboxes, and over 2000 with drugboxes. I think we have many compounds on WP without chemboxes, but they are typically very brief articles (stubs) with little information. Of course linking into the mainstream of chemical information, as dbpedia seeks to do, may provide an incentive for more wikichemists to work on adding chemboxes. Sounds great!
Martin A. Walker (Walkerma on WP)