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The International Science Grid published a feature story this week about OSCAR. OSCAR is the Open Source Chemistry Analysis Routines application.
OSCAR’s open source software is designed to make research easier for chemists. What the software does is it parses the natural language scientists use when writing about chemistry – along with graphs, formulae and equations – linking all relevant information.
“The software’s primary purpose is to recognize concepts in text that have a precise meaning,” Simon Hettrick reported.
One of the project members Peter Murray-Rust “says that it not only recognizes chemical names, adjectives and processes, but is able to link them into their meaning using an ontology — a rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant relationships,” write Hettrick.
OSCAR frees the researcher from having to spend hours hunting down every permutation of a specific word, symbol or phrase.
