From the webpage:
OSCAR (Open Source Chemistry Analysis Routines) is an open source extensible system for the automated annotation of chemistry in scientific articles. It can be used to identify chemical names, reaction names, ontology terms, enzymes and chemical prefixes and adjectives. In addition, where possible, any chemical names detected will be annotated with structures derived either by lookup, or name-to-structure parsing using OPSIN[1] or with identifiers from the ChEBI (`Chemical Entities of Biological Interest’) ontology.
The current version of OSCAR. OSCAR4, focuses on providing a core library that facilitates integration with other tools. Its simple to use API is modularised to promote extension into other domains and allows for its use within workflow systems like Taverna[2] and U-Compare [3].
We will be hosting a launch on the 13th of April to discuss the new architecture as well as demonstrate some applications that use OSCAR. Tutorial sessions on on how to use the new API will also be provided.
Archived videos from the launch are now online: http://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/1130934
Just to put this into a topic map context, imagine that the annotation in question was placement in an association with mappings to other data, data that was held by your employer and leased to researchers.