Final Thoughts on ACS

Well the 2006 Fall ACS meeting in San Francisco is now over and I am back in Philly, catching up on things.

My talk on UsefulChem was on the last talk of the last day on Thursday. Although not optimal, a few people stuck around to the bitter end. However, I recorded my talk and made it available here.

The most productive part of this conference was probably the discussions I had over lunch with Peter Murray-Rust, Henry Rzepa and Geoff Hutchison. We brainstormed some ways to move cheminformatics forward. Peter suggested that we set up a literature review blog from a few organic chemists. With Tenderbutton calling it quits, it couldn't hurt to inject some more organic chemistry into the blogosphere. Certainly, we are eager to extend the CMLRSS feeds from UsefulChem and see if CMLReact makes sense to use.

One of the more exciting projects brought up at the conference was OSCAR, the robot that reads chemistry journals looking for errors and extracting chemical information (like NMR data). If the copyright issues can be overcome, I think that this approach has a huge potential in quickly populating the open chemical data resources.

Peter also did a nice write-up of UsefulChem on his blog.