blog

It seems like ages ago, but back in May, I gave a talk at an e-conference on Open Babel, the chemical file translation library and program.

At the time, the conference organizer wrote up an introduction to my talk in his blog. I haven’t had much chance to look at it since then, but remembered that I’d promised to cross-reference the talk and Barry’s blog posting if I set up a blog of my own. Consider it done, Barry.

The talk was quite unusual for me, as Open Babel is something of a hobby–I tend to code on it in my free time, though it has proven incredibly useful and time-saving in my day-to-day research. But as I’d never talked about “cheminformatics,” much less Open Babel, I didn’t know what topics would be useful. Now I see that Barry’s made all sorts of wonderful claims about OB as a “savior.” Wow, we haven’t even gotten version 2.0 out the door.

But I understand the concern and the hope. Chemistry, biochemistry, and related areas create new file formats like there’s no tomorrow. Every program has their own input and output formats and a very few minimal formats are used in interchange. Hopefully that’ll change soon. Hopefully when I have more time (ha!) I’ll be able to put a bit more resources behind Open Babel. I’d like to believe that with some coding and effort, it’ll finally convince developers to stop creating more formats!

(Hmm, all the talk about “babel” and I’m sure I’ll get interesting blogspam now…)