ChemSpy Chem Blog

Chemical Aggregation

Mon, 21 May 2007 19:11:39 GMT

Chemspy has added a new chemistry news section to bring you the latest and greatest chemistry newsfeeds from around the globe. This is very much a "beta" project and the format and feeds aggregated are likely to change as we receive feedback on the new service. We are currently aggregating five chemistry RSS feeds from major news outlets. We are not scraping blogs to create a splog, but are using the format of really simple syndication (RSS) to provide visitors with a single entry point to chemistry news. If you know of a newsfeed you think we should aggregate in this service, please let us know at office@chemspy.com.nospam. If you would like to subscribe to our meta feed, please use the following link: http://www.chemspy.com/chemistry-news/feed/

Organic Lectures Reach Drexel Island

Mon, 21 May 2007 19:17:28 GMT

Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University has taken his second life persona to his professional bosom and is now providing organic chemistry students not only with obelisks on the dragon-shaped island of Drexel (Drexopia, perhaps?), but they can now see orgaic chemistry lectures there too. It is an incredibly innovative use of SL, but I wonder whether students are going to feel like they are being monitored not only in the real world of university lecture rooms and study areas, but in the escapist virtual spaces of SL too. Scary thought.

DBPedia for Chemists

Tue, 15 May 2007 19:17:11 GMT

Cambridge chemist Peter Murray-Rust recently alerted me to the DBpedia service. DBpedia.org is a community effort to extract structured information (semantics) from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated questions of Wikipedia rather than carrying out simple searches. "DBPedia is a semantic distillate of Wikipedia and soon all the chemistry will be in semantic form," asserts Murray-Rust, "It will then be possible to ask questions like: "find compounds which were discovered by a Russian chemist in the 19th Century". That is a simplistic example, of course. He believes that such efforts form part of a new information philosophy of "linked data" and points out that Open chemical resources, such as Pubchem, DBPedia, CrystalEye, ChEBI, etc. will soon become part of that philosophy.

Chemspy Blog Archived

Mon, 14 May 2007 19:29:43 GMT

Previous ChemSpy posts have now been archived check out the Chemspy chemistry news archives page.