The Web - What is the issue?

From Wikipedia.

Last week I gave an invited presentation in the nice library of the Royal Society of Chemistry, at the What's in a Name? The Unsung Heroes of Open Innovation: Nomenclature and Terminology meeting. I was asked to speak about HTML in this context, something I have worked with as channel for communication of scientific knowledge and data for almost 20 years know. Mostly in the area of small molecules, starting with the Dictionary of Organic Chemistry, which is interesting because I presented the web technologies behind this project also in London, October 10 years ago!

As a spoiler, the bottom line of my presentation is that we're not even using 10% of what the web technologies have to offer us. Slowly we are getting there, but too slow in my opinion. For some weird behavioral law, the larger the organization the less innovation gets done (some pointers).

Anyway, I only had 20 minutes, and in that time you cannot do justice to the web technologies.

Papers that I mention in these slides are given below.

Wiener, H. Structural determination of paraffin boiling points. Journal of the American Chemical Society 69, 17-20 (1947). URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja01193a005.

Murray-Rust, P., Rzepa, H. S., Williamson, M. J. & Willighagen, E. L. Chemical markup, XML, and the world wide web. 5. applications of chemical metadata in RSS aggregators. J Chem Inf Comput Sci 44, 462-469 (2004). URL http://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/2066/60101/1/60101.pdf.

Rzepa, H. S., Murray-Rust, P. & Whitaker, B. J. The application of chemical multipurpose internet mail extensions (chemical MIME) internet standards to electronic mail and world wide web information exchange. J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 38, 976-982 (1998). URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ci9803233.

Willighagen, E. et al. Userscripts for the life sciences. BMC Bioinformatics 8, 487+ (2007). URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-8-487.

Willighagen, E. L. & Brändle, M. P. Resource description framework technologies in chemistry. Journal of cheminformatics 3, 15+ (2011). URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-3-15.