Cameron, There was an interesting post to bring The realm of Organic Synthesis discussions to an "end". Mitch commented that the chemical informatics guys don't get it and there is something big to come. Let's see what they will unveil...He commented..

"Reading through all the comments I can't help but feel the chemical informatics guys don't get it. The critical error seems to derive from making tools that can do cool things but not having a critical mass of users to make it relevant. I've always approached problems from the critical mass side, and let others worry about indexing, tagging, and developing tools in the future.

What J and I are planning is truly awesome, but it is not going to fall within the realm of the type of collaborative work that the chemical informatics people know so well. J will announce the project in the next couple of days. I think you will find it completely awesome, or simply not get it. It could go either way from reading through the comments."

I'll expand on your comments separately in a post I am working on..this in regards to "but that if there are resources out there they can be aggregated into Chemspider. There are two problems here, capturing the knowledge into one “placeâ€ and then aggregating." I believe that all original web-based knowledge can remain at it's original site but can be replicated or linked, if permission allows, from our site. We're not trying to replace everyone's efforts..we are trying to help people find those resources. The approach may not be the most elegant informatics solution but I don't think most informatics people would consider that Wikipedia is pushing the edge either...but it's value is obvious.

Our focus is on how to help people get to information of value as fast as possible and do it, for now, from a structure-centric point of view. We are focused on structures since this remains a largely unfulfilled issue other than by commercial systems. We keeping hearing about "an alternative to Scifinder" and seeing the exchanges about how people can't afford to access that tool. It is possible to build an alternative and it will take agreements between publishers and authors and participation
of the community.