(Posted on behalf of Steve Heller.)

Under a contract from the InChI Trust (http://www.inchi-trust.org), Digital Chemistry has prepared a detailed report and specifications for high level documentation of the InChI algorithm and related software.

The Trust now wishes to contract to undertake this documentation effort.

The following provides the background/summary for the work.  Details and the full RFP can be obtained from Steve Heller. Individuals and organizations are encouraged to submit bids for this work,. The deadline for submission of bids is 12 November 2010.

All responses to this RFP will be evaluated by a technical panel from  the IUPAC Division VIII InChI subcommittee, the group responsible for the InChI standard.

  Steve Heller
  Project Director
  InChI Trust

Summary:

Though a substantial amount of documentation for users of InChIs and the InChI Software is

available, detailed technical documentation of the algorithms used, and of the program code itself,

is incomplete and somewhat scattered. Documentation is required both to rigorously describe the

process of creating an InChI so that it can in principle be re-implemented de novo, and to describe

the way in which that process is implemented in the existing InChI program code. To a

considerable extent the current definition of the InChI-generation process is the existing program

itself, and we therefore recommend that the appropriate sections of the existing Technical Manual

be expanded to give full program documentation with references to the program code. Though the

original code authors are likely to be able to produce appropriate documentation in the shortest

time, an independent documentation writer is likely to be able to document it more

comprehensively We estimate that an independent writer would need around 20 days  for the

task.

 Steve Heller
  Project Director
  InChI Trust
steve@inchi-trust.org