Oscar: training data, models, etc

Oscar uses a Maximum Entropy Markov Model (MEMM) based on n-grams. Peter Corbett has written this up (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-S11-S4). So, it basically is statistics once more. If you really want a proper bioinformatics education, so do your PhD at a (proteo)chemometrics department. 2 minute read

Status update on BJOC analysis with Oscar and ChemicalTagger #3

The two earlier posts in this series showed screenshots of results of Oscar, but the title also promised results by Lezan’s ChemicalTagger. Sam helped with getting the HTML pages online via the Cambridge Hudson installation. Where Oscar find named entities (chemical compounds, processes, etc), ChemicalTagger finds roles, like solvent, acid, base, catalyst. Roles are properties of chemical compounds in certain situations. Ethanol is not always a solvent, sometimes it is a Xmas present. The current output is not entirely where I want to go yet, but makes it easy which solvents are frequently found in the BJOC corpus: less than 1 minute read

ChemWriter, Google Chrome, and Many Eyes in Open Source

Linus’ law: less than 1 minute read

Adding a new dictionary to Oscar

Say, you have your own dictionary of chemical compounds. For example, like your company’s list of yet-unpublished internal research codes. Still, you want to index your local listserv to make it easier for your employees to search for particular chemistry you are working on and perhaps related to something done at other company sites. This is what Oscar is for. 2 minute read

Oscar4 command line utilities

One goal of my three month project is to take Oscar4 to the community. We want to get it used more, and we need a larger development community. Oscar4 and the related technologies do a good, sometimes excellent, job, but have to be maintained, just like any other piece of code. To make using it easier, we are developing new APIs, as well as two user-oriented applications: a Taverna 2 plugin , and command line utilities. The Oscar4 Java API has slightly evolved in the last three weeks, removing some complexity. In this post, I will introduce the command line utilities. 2 minute read

CiteULike CiTO Use Case #1: Wordles

Last month I reported a few things I missed in CiteULike. One of them was support for CiTO (see doi:10.1186/2041-1480-1-S1-S6), a great Citation Typing Ontology. 1 minute read

Oscar4 Java API: chemical name dictionaries

Besides getting Oscar used by ChEBI (hopefully via Taverna ), my main task in my three month Oscar project is to refactor things to make it more modular, and remove some features no longer needed (e.g. an automatically created workspace environment). Clearly, I need to define a lot of new unit tests to ensure my assumptions on how to code works are valid. 1 minute read