Facilitating the exchange of chemical data

PubChem has released the beta of its PUG SOAP (Power User Gateway Simple Object Access Protocol).  From the site:

PUG SOAP is a web services access layer to PubChem functionality. It is based on a WSDL [Web Service Definition Language].…

PubChem's PUG (Power User Gateway), documented elsewhere, is an XML-based interface suitable for low-level programmatic access to PubChem services, wherein data is exchanged through a relatively complex XML schema that is powerful but requires some expertise to use. PUG SOAP contains much of the same functionality, but broken down into simpler functions defined in a WSDL, using the SOAP protocol for information exchange.…