Antony Williams
VP of Strategic Development, Royal Society of Chemistry
Manager of the cheinformatics team, Royal Society of Chemistry
Antony Williams is the VP of Strategic Development for the Royal Society of Chemistry and manager of the cheinformatics team for the RSC. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry specializing in analytical sciences, and has worked in academia, in government labs, and for a Fortune 500 company before joining the start-up company ACD/Labs as their Chief Science Officer for over a decade. He started a hobby project to develop the ChemSpider database, one of the community’s primary online chemistry resources, which was ultimately acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). At the RSC he is now involved with a number of national and international projects for delivering chemistry related data to the chemistry community. He is widely published with over 150 publications and book chapters and is known as the ChemConnector in the social networks. He has worked on the quality of chemistry content on Wikipedia, is a recipient of the Jim Gray award for eScience from Microsoft, is adjunct professor at North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is particularly focused at this time in helping scientists understand the power of the web for encouraging crowd sourced participation and social networking in science.
Abstract
HOSTING PUBLIC DOMAIN CHEMICALS DATA ONLINE FOR THE COMMUNITY – THE CHALLENGES OF HANDLING MATERIALS
A. Antony J. Williams*
1Royal Society of Chemistry, Data Informatics, Wake Forest, NC-27587
*email: williamsa@rsc.org
The Royal Society of Chemistry hosts one of the worlds’ richest collections of online chemistry data that is free-to-access for the community. ChemSpider presently hosts over 30 million unique chemical compounds together with associated data and accessible via a number of search techniques. With almost 50,000 unique users per day from around the world the site offers scientists the ability to investigate the world of small molecules via property searches, analytical data and predictive models. The challenges associated with providing a similar platform for “materials” are manifold but, if they could be addressed, would offer a valuable service to the materials community. This presentation will provide an overview of how ChemSpider was built, our efforts to expand the capabilities to a more encompassing data repository and some of the challenges faced to embrace the diverse world of materials informatics and online data access.