http://depth-first.com/articles/tag/fda en-us 40 Walking the Web of Chemical Informatics <p><a href="http://hmdb.med.ualberta.ca/foodb/"><img src="http://depth-first.com/demo/20070306/foodb.png" align="right" border="0"></img></a><a href="http://hmdb.med.ualberta.ca/foodb/">FooDB</a> contains over 1,900 structures used as food additives in the United States. The data in FooDB are provided by the <a href="http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/eafus.html">FDA EAFUS site</a>. You can search by CAS number, IUPAC name, or molecular formula. And in what is likely to be a trend to watch closely, FooDB is powered by the Web application framework <a href="http://www.rubyonrails.org/">Ruby on Rails</a>.</p> <p>FooDB is not alone: the number of <a href="http://depth-first.com/articles/2007/01/24/thirty-two-free-chemistry-databases">free chemistry databases on the Web</a> just keeps growing. How this trend ultimately plays out is anybody's guess.</p> <p>One thing is clear: the point is rapidly approaching at which database aggregation technologies will start to matter. No chemist wants to search through over thirty databases to find the information they need on a molecule. They want it delivered in one quick, intuitive, user-friendly package. Here's another example of something that's <a href="http://depth-first.com/articles/tag/broken">broken</a> in cheminformatics. Like all broken things, it's the source of great frustration for users and great opportunity for developers.</p> Tue, 06 Mar 2007 11:09:00 +0000 urn:uuid:e506dc14-5608-42b8-97aa-8f040a3f527c Rich Apodaca http://depth-first.com/articles/2007/03/06/yet-another-free-chemistry-database-foodb Databases broken foodb web fda rails ruby