oreChem is a two-year international project to develop and deploy technology to enable new models for research and dissemination of scholarly materials in the Chemistry community. The project is taking a three-tiered approach to this technology:
- Data Models - develop a core model, ontology, and extensions to represent the entities of Chemistry research and their relationships. This model will reflect the centrality of molecular compounds to Chemistry research. It will build on the work of Open Archives Initiative - Object Reuse and Exchange, which has developed a Web-centric model to identify and describe aggregations of Web resources - documents, data, images, simulations, services, etc.
- Data Sources - expose a variety of Chemistry data sources according to the data model. While the project is initially focusing on open access data from crystallography and biochemistry, the project is hoping to establish liaisons with providers of other data. The project is exploring methods for populating these data sources that employ both automated extraction from existing Chemistry scholarly corpora and insertion via new authoring and data collection tools.
- Applications - Develop a number of exemplar applications that demonstrate the utility of the data model and the manner in which it permits the creation of new scholarly artifacts and services based on the mashing up of distributed, heterogeneous data. Initial target application are authoring tools, Web 2.0 tools for constructing social networks over Chemistry data, and enhanced chemical structure search.
The members of the oreChem project invite interest and cooperation from other members of the Chemistry, Computer Science, Information Science, and Web community to work towards a cyberinfrastructure that will enable a number of innovations and provide a basis for integrating Chemistry research into the increasingly cross-disciplinary world of eScience.