Making the Case: OpenSMILES

SMILES is one of the most widely-used line notations in cheminformatics. Yet until very recently, there has been no concerted attempt to develop open SMILES encoding standards.

OpenSMILES aims to change that. By providing a forum in which concerns from the SMILES user community can be voiced, peer-reviewed, and addressed, OpenSMILES introduces a new way for the SMILES language to become better.

A draft OpenSMILES specification is now available for review. For now, the best way to raise issues and otherwise get involved is through the OpenSMILES mailing list.