Open Babel: One year on by Bailey Fallon.
From the post:
Just over a year ago, Journal of Cheminformatics published a paper describing the open source chemical toolbox, Open Babel. Despite almost 10 years as an independent project, a description of the features and implementation of Open Babel had never been formally published. However, in the 14 months since publication, the Open Babel paper has quickly become one of the most influential articles in Journal of Cheminformatics. It is the second most cited article in the journal according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science, and is amongst the most widely read, with close to 10 000 accesses. The software itself has been downloaded over 40 000 times in the last year alone.
Open Babel attempts to solve a common problem in cheminformatics – the need to convert between different chemical structure formats. It offers a solution by allowing anyone to search, convert, analyze, or store data in over 110 formats covering molecular modeling, chemistry, solid-state materials, biochemistry, and related areas.
Introductory training guide to Open Babel (by Noel O’Boyle).
That impressive!
But you need to remember it wasn’t that many years ago when commercial conversion software offered more than 300 source and target formats.
Still, worth taking a deep look to see if there are useful lessons for topic maps.