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At Last! URIs for InChI

Tony Hammond – 2007 February 19

In WebInChI

The info registry has now added in the InChI namespace (see registry entry here) which now means that chemical compounds identified by InChIs (IUPAC‘s International Chemical Identifiers) are expressible in URI form and thus amenable to many Web-based description technologies that use URI as the means to identify objects, e.g. XLink, RDF, etc. As an example, the InChI identifier for naphthalene is

InChI=1/C10H8/c1-2-6-10-8-4-3-7-9(10)5-1/h1-8H

and can now be legitimately expressed in URI form as

info:inchi/InChI=1/C10H8/c1-2-6-10-8-4-3-7-9(10)5-1/h1-8H

The info URI scheme exists to support legacy namespaces get a leg up onto the Web. Registered namespaces include PubMed identifiers, DOIs, handles, ADS bibcodes, etc. Increasingly we’ll be expecting to see identifiers (both new and old) represented in a common form - URI.