DISTRIBUTED BY NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP ON BEHALF OF THE
INCHI TRUST
21 July 2009
Contact: Grace Baynes
Corporate Public Relations, Nature Publishing Group
T:+44 (0)20 7014 4063
The InChI Trust, a not-for-profit organisation to expand
and develop the InChI Open Source chemical structure representation algorithm,
is formally launched this week. Originally developed by the International Union
of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the IUPAC International Chemical
Identifier (InChI) is an alpha-numeric character string generated by an
algorithm. The InChI was developed as a new, non-proprietary, international
standard to represent chemical structures.
The Trust aims to develop and improve on the current
InChI standard, further enabling the interlinking of chemistry and chemical
structures on the web. The connection with IUPAC is maintained through IUPAC's
InChI Subcommittee.
The InChI algorithm turns chemical structures into
machine-readable strings of information. InChIs are unique to the compound they
describe and can encode absolute stereochemistry Machine-readable, the InChI
allows chemistry and chemical structures to be navigable and discoverable. A
simple analogy is that InChI is the bar-code for chemistry and chemical
structures. The InChI format and algorithm are non-proprietary and the software
is open source, with ongoing development done by the community.
"The goal of the InChI Trust", says Project
Director Stephen Heller "is to continue to develop the InChI and InChIKey,
the condensed machine-searchable version, as a tool to enable widescale linking
of chemical information."
The InChI Trust was formally incorporated in the UK in
May 2009, and now has 6 charter members: The Royal Society of Chemistry, Nature
Publishing Group, FIZ-Chemie Berlin, Symyx Technologies, Taylor & Francis
and OpenEye. Further organizations and publishers are in the process of joining
the InChI Trust.
"Nature Publishing Group is delighted to be a
charter member of the InChI Trust", says Jason Wilde, Publisher for the
Physical Sciences, Nature Publishing Group."We view the ongoing
maintenance of the InChI algorithm, and the resulting adoption of InChI, as
important for the development of chemistry communication. The interlinking that
the InChI offers between journal content and databases ensures that chemistry
is the first truly web-enabled scientific discipline."
"The InChI has already gained a wide user
base," says Richard Kidd, Informatics Manager at the Royal Society of
Chemistry, "and the Trust will ensure continuing development and support
for this key standard, helping to link together chemical resources across the
internet. The RSC is proud to support the InChI Trust."
Since the introduction of the InChI in 2005, there has
been widespread take-up of InChI standards by public databases and journals.
Today, there are more than 100 million InChIs in scientific literature and
products.
To date, numerous databases, journals, and chemical
structure drawing programs have incorporated the InChI algorithm. These include
the NIST WebBook and mass spectral databases, the NIH/NCBI PubChem database,
the NIH/NCI database, the EBI chemistry database, ChemSpider, Symyx Draw and
many others.
The initiative serves chemists, publishers, chemical
software companies, chemical structure drawing vendors, librarians, and intermediaries
by creating an international standard to represent defined chemical structures.
This provides a consistent, credible and compatible way for databases of
chemical structures to be linked together for the benefit of users of chemical
information around the world.
-ENDS-
For further information, please contact:
Project Director, Dr. Stephen Heller at steve@inchi-trust.org
Background notes:
The InChI project was initially undertaken by IUPAC with the
cooperation of National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). In 2009,
a standard version of InChI and the InChIKey were released. Members of the
InChI Trust will pay annual dues to support the continued development of InChI,
and maintainance of the InChI algorithm. This income will be used exclusively
for InChI algorithm development, maintenance, outreach, and educational
activities associated with the project
Details of the up-take by many chemical database
providers, software developers, and educational activities associated with the
project
Details of the up-take by many chemical database
providers, software developers, and journal publishers are available at www.iupac.org/inchi/adopters.html
Dr. Wendy A. Warr
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Associates
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