Jean-Claude Bradley at Useful Chemistry has announced (a few weeks ago) that the international chemical company Alfa Aesar has agreed to open source its melting point data. This is important not just because Alfa Aesar is one of the most important sources of that information. It also provides a model that could work outside of chemistry and science.

The data will be useful to the Open Notebook Science solubility project, and because Alfa has agreed to Open Data access, it can be useful far beyond that. In return, the Open Notebook folks cleaned up Alfa’s data, putting it into a clean database format, providing unique IDs (ChemSpiderIDs), and linking back to the Alfa Aesar catalog page.

Open Notebook then merged the cleaned-up data set with several others. The result was a set of 13,436 Open Data melting point values.

They then created a Web tool for exploring the merged dataset.

Why stop with melting points? Why stop with chemistry? Open data for, say, books could lead readers to libraries, publishers, bookstores, courses, other readers…

Categories: libraries, too big to know dw