Cambridge/OMII Workshop on OSCAR and OPSIN

We are delighted to be working with OMII-UK on the refactoring of OSCAR and OPSIN – our tools for chemical entity extraction and chemical name2structure conversion. There is now a lot of interest and uptake in these tools and we are now running a 1-day workshop. Here are the details – anyone is welcome to come – first-come first served.

As you may know we are working with OMII-UK under the JISC ENGAGE program to refactor, repackage and enhance the OpenSource OSCAR and OPSIN software. OSCAR is now ca 7 years old and is widely used in chemistry and bioscience for the identification of chemical entities in text. Informal studies have shown it probably has the highest precision and recall of any commonly used tool.  OPSIN's name2Structure has been informally tested against corpora of names, and again it is not far behind the leading commercial tool and has a smaller error rate.

We get feedback from many groups and have started to get offers of help in kind to enhance these tools. We are therefore inviting a number of collaborators and early adopters to a relatively informal workshop to explore what you would like to see done to OSCAR/OPSIN.

This is provisionally scheduled for 9th July 2009 and will be held in the Unilever Centre, Cambridge. There is no charge for attendance at the workshop and lunch will be provided. The programme will include presentations of the experience of 2-3 early adopters; a wish-list
session; a tour through the architecture; and a roadmap of the projected enhancements through the ENGAGE project.  We would welcome input from you into the future of OSCAR/OPSIN, and how the evolution of these applications would best meet your future needs.

Anyone interested in OSCAR/OPSIN, both non- and for-profit, is welcome to attend and should contact s.brewer@ecs.soton.ac.uk at OMII-UK.

For more information about OMII-UK, please see http://www.omii.ac.uk/, and for ENGAGE, please go to http://www.engage.ac.uk/.  You can find out more information about OSCAR from http://oscar3-chem.sourceforge.net/, and http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/.