Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 2, Issue 2; February 2001

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

News:

Clearing House for Chemical Information Instructional Materials (CCIIM): The Clearinghouse for Chemical Information Instructional Materials (CCIIM) at Indiana University, collects and distributes items that were developed to instruct you in the use of chemical information sources. These may have been created by chemistry or science librarians, chemists, publishers, or others. The CCIIM was initiated by the chemistry information divisions of the American Chemical Society and the Special Libraries Association.
Mathematical Markup Language (MathML): The mathematics mark up language test suite was released in December 2000. MathMl is making good progress, despite mathematics requiring "the use of a complex and highly evolved system of two-dimensional symbolic notations." Does this have anything in common with chemistry? MathML is an application of XML. Is mathematics easier than chemistry? CML is also developing.
Gene Expression Markup Language (GEML): Gene Expression Markup Language (GEML(tm)) GEML, an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based tag set, was developed by Rosetta Inpharmatics and others in the GEML community to provide a standard method of exchanging gene expression data along with the associated gene and experiment annotation. This has been submitted to the Object Management Group in response to an RFP (Request for proposals) issued by the OMG in March 2000.
MGED: The Microarray Gene Expression Database has also submitted a proposal to the OMG. Which is better? Could there be two standards? MGED has the support of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).
OASIS: Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), is a non-profit, international consortium that creates interoperable industry specifications based on public standards such as XML and SGML (See OMG).
2nd Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics: Computational Tools for Lead Discovery: 2nd Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics: Computational Tools for Lead Discovery
mSQL: A new release of mSQL is expected on February 15th. mSQL is a light weight relational database management system, similar to MySQL and PostgreSQL. It is free, subject to license conditions.
Pre-prints in chemistry: Physicists rely on preprint servers to communicate their work (Physics at Los Alamos and Chemical-Physics at Los Alamos and Brown University. Should chemists do this too? The ChemWeb Preprint Server has been running for some time. The ACS has just produced a formal policy statement on this issue. The ACS have decided that anything revealed on a preprint server should be regarded as a publication, and so will not be considered for publication in an ACS journal.

Web Sites:

Impact Factors: Which is the most important journal? Impact factors are the average number of citations per paper per year, and so give a measure of the importance of a journal.
Linux for Chemistry: This site, which is linked from the WWW Virtual Library for Chemistry, maintains a list of chemistry programs for Linux.
Amos' WWW links page: This list contains links to information sources for life scientists with an interest in biological macromolecules (protein sequence, 3D structure and 2D-gel analytical tools are provided on the ExPASy server, and from its Proteomics tools page)