OSCAR4 Launch

#oscar4launch

I am delighted to announce the launch of OSCAR4:

http://www-pmr.ch.cam.ac.uk/wiki/OSCAR4_Launch

OSCAR (Open Source Chemistry Analysis Routines) is an open source extensible system for the automated annotation of chemistry in scientific articles. It can be used to identify chemical names, reaction names, ontology terms, enzymes and chemical prefixes and adjectives. In addition, where possible, any chemical names detected will be annotated with structures derived either by lookup, or name-to-structure parsing using OPSIN[1] or with identifiers from the ChEBI(`Chemical Entities of Biological Interest’) ontology.

The current version of OSCAR. OSCAR4, focuses on providing a core library that facilitates integration with other tools. Its simple to use API is modularised to promote extension into other domains and allows for its use within workflow systems like Taverna[2] and U-Compare [3].

We will be hosting a launch on the 13th of April to discuss the new architecture as well as demonstrate some applications that use OSCAR. Tutorial sessions on on how to use the new API will also be provided.

OSCAR4 is a major rewrite and the people involved : Lezan Hawizy, Bala Kolluru, David Jessop, Sam Adams and others deserve great credit. OSCAR4 makes it much easier to incorporate as a module for:

  • Training/machine-learning
  • Domain adaptation
  • Web applications
  • Etc.

We see OSCAR4 as potentially applicable to a wide range of corpora in physical sciences (not just chemistry) and is particularly suited to named entities, quantities with units and errors and chemistry-in-other-disciplines

 

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