Of considerable interest is the conference, occurring as I write this email, in Boston, under the auspices of the World-Wide Web consortium, on the topic of the "semantic Web in Life sciences", with particular emphasis on the so called LSID (Life sciences identifier). With some 4 billion documents and many types of object now described on the Web, uniquely indentifying these is an urgent priority. I offer to this form two "position papers" submitted to the above dealing more specifically with chemistry; http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swls-ws/2004Sep/ and particularly http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swls-ws/2004Sep/att-0025/molsem.h... and http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swls-ws/2004Sep/att-0026/inchi.ht... The latter in particular deals with the topic of chemical identifiers, namely the INChI project. If you dont know about this project, I urge you to go find out! A futher announcement regarding this conference will be made shortly. -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs@mac.com (iChat) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. (Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).