Data Enhancing the RSC Archive

The Royal Society of Chemistry has an archive of published journals and books stretching back to 1841. In the past decade we have digitized this archive and semantically enriched our frontfile data with chemical structures linked to our free online chemical compound database, ChemSpider. In this talk we will survey our recent efforts to extract all kinds of data – chemical structures, experimental and bibliographic data – from both our backfile and frontfile. We will also discuss our future work to extract chemical reactions to host in our ChemSpider Reactions database and will discuss the potential applications of optical structure recognition technologies for converting structure images to structures as well as using similar techniques to convert experimental spectral data into interactive data formats. A key aspect of this project is the delivery of a crowdsourcing platform for the interactive annotation and validation of the extracted data.