Crowdsourced Chemistry Why Online Chemistry Data Needs Your Help by Antony Williams. (video)
From the description:
This is the Ignite talk that I gave at ScienceOnline2010 #sci010 in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina on January 16th 2010. This was supposed to be a 5 minute talk highlighting the quality of chemistry data on the internet. Ok, it was a little tongue in cheek because it was an after dinner talk and late at night but the data are real, the problem is real and the need for data curation of chemistry data online is real. On ChemSpider we have provided a platform to deposit and curate data. Other videos will show that in the future.
Great demonstration of the need for curation in chemistry.
And of the impact that re-usable information can have on the quality of information.
The errors in chemical descriptions you see in this video could be corrected in:
- In an article.
- In a monograph.
- In a webpage.
- In an online resource that can be incorporated by reference.
Which one do you think would propagate the corrected information more quickly?
Documents are a great way to convey information to a reader.
They are an incredibly poor way to store/transmit information.
Every reader has to extract the information in a document for themselves.
Not to mention that data is fixed, unless it has incorporated information by reference.
Funny isn’t it? We are still storing data as we did when clay tablets were the medium of choice.
Isn’t it time we separated presentation (documents) from storage/transmission (data)?