The Blue Obelisk—Interoperability in Chemical Informatics

Rajarshi Guha, Michael T. Howard, Geoffrey R. Hutchison, Peter Murray-Rust, Henry Rzepa, Christoph Steinbeck, Jörg Wegner, Egon Willighagen. “The Blue Obelisk—Interoperability in Chemical Informatics” J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2006 46(3) 991-998. Open Access.

toc image The Blue Obelisk Movement (http://www.blueobelisk.org/) is the name used by a diverse Internet group promoting reusable chemistry via open source software development, consistent and complimentary chemoinformatics research, open data, and open standards. We outline recent examples of cooperation in the Blue Obelisk group:  a shared dictionary of algorithms and implementations in chemoinformatics algorithms drawing from our various software projects; a shared repository of chemoinformatics data including elemental properties, atomic radii, isotopes, atom typing rules, and so forth; and Web services for the platform-independent use of chemoinformatics programs.