#solo10: Green Chain Reaction starts to deliver Open Notebook Science and Open Patents

Scraped/typed into Arcturus

The Green Chain Reaction is now delivering results! Due to the enormous contribution of volunteers we have now distributed work over many machines and extracted large amounts of data and successfully text-mined it. On my laptop alone I have nearly 500,000 files. It got quite hot last night.

I’m guessing that we’ve done about 20% of the possible work – perhaps 100+ weekly indexes out of 600. We’ve got enough to answer our original question and we’ll start to do this. The software gets better each day and there’s still opportunity for anyone to take part before Saturday, Please mail me or leave a name on http://okfnpad.org/openPatents.

We’ve aggregated yearly indexes, and you can browse these. Here’s a typical one.

http://greenchain.ch.cam.ac.uk/patents/results/2006/yearTotal.htm

(You could download this into a spread sheet if you want – we hope to show something exciting on Saturday). You can even try to answer our question – are solvents “greener” in 2010 than 2000?

I’ll update the instructions. Some of you have been very patient as the software showed unexpected bug – well, we expected bugs but we didn’t know which! It runs for most people now most of the time which is great if we are simply collecting “enough” data.

The GCR is of course much more than a simple experiment. It’s the first distributed Open (OKD) chemical information experiment we know of. All the data, code and results are completely Open. It’s been done in real-time so it’s Open Notebook Science. It’s a model for Open computational science.

It creates a completely Open resource (we still have to add the OKF Open data buttons). There’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the start of an Open Patent resource.

I am sure you can think of other things the GCR explores. Must rush…