We are at the Microsoft External Research conference in Redmond, having spent 2 days on the OREChem project. I’ve been too busy to blog much as tomorrow we are presenting the MS-sponsored OREChem and Chem4Word projects for the first time.
OREChem is coordinated by Carl Lagoze (Cornell) and brings together Southampton, Indiana U, Penn State and Cambridge to develop an ORE RDF model for chemistry. We’ve been going 3 months and on Sunday it all stared coming together. I’ve worked with Soton and Indiana before, and it has been great to make new and excting links with PSU. Many of you will know them for CiteSeer and ChemXSeer but I hadn’t realised how well their information extraction techniques mapped onto ours. They’ve got some pretty smart stuff for extracting information from chemistry in PDF documents which maps directly onto OSCAR3+OPSIN and CML.
Chem4Word is an Add-In for Word2007 which provides semantic and ontological authoring for chemistry. It’s more powerful and flexible than standalone chemical editors (which have no knowledge of any document context, either structural or semantic). It’s been a real experience for us Java-types in Cambridge to be introduced to .NET, XAML, WPF, C#, etc. by the Redmond team of Alex, Lee, Savas, Pablo, Tola, Anthony and JimMcG. Joe’s picked it up well (and patiently guides me through the devlopment system (TFS)).
So we’ve arrived at the first stage – showing to a friendly community (MS External Reserach and many international collaborators). When C4W is released it will be Open Source and intended for collaborative devlopment of semantics chemistry – applications and content. We’ll keep you in touch – it should be fun.
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