View source for World Wide Molecular Matrix

{{Short description|Proposed repository for chemical data}}
The '''World Wide Molecular Matrix''' ('''WWMM''') was a proposed electronic [[Social:Disciplinary repository|repository]] for unpublished chemical [[Data|data]]. First introduced in 2002 by Peter Murray-Rust and his colleagues in the [[Chemistry:Chemistry|chemistry]] department at the [[Organization:University of Cambridge|University of Cambridge]] in the {{wipe|United Kingdom}}, WWMM provided a free, easily searchable [[Database|database]] for information about thousands of complicated molecules, data that would otherwise remain inaccessible to scientists.

Murray-Rust, a chemical [[Chemistry:Cheminformatics|informatics]] specialist, has estimated that 80% of the results produced by chemists around the world is never published in scientific journals.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/rt/printerFriendly/130/128|title=Journal of Digital Information, Vol 5, No 1 (2004) The Next Big Thing: From Hypermedia to Datuments|last=Peter Murray-Rust and Henry S. Rzepa|date=2004|website=Texas Digital Library}}</ref> Most of this data is not ground-breaking, yet it could conceivably be of use to scientists doing related projects—if they could access it. The WWMM was proposed as a solution to this problem. It would house the results of experiments on over 100,000 molecules in [[Chemistry:Physical chemistry|physical chemistry]], [[Chemistry:Organic chemistry|organic chemistry]], [[Biology:Biochemistry|biochemistry]] and medicinal chemistry.

In other scientific fields, the need for a similar depository to house inaccessible information could be more acute. In a presentation at the "[[Organization:CERN|CERN]] Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications ([[Open Archives Initiative|OAI4]])", Murray-Rust said that chemistry actually leads other fields in published data. He estimated that the majority of the data in some scientific fields never reaches publication.<ref name=":0" />

Although scientific in nature, the WWMM was part of the broader [[Open Archives Initiative|open archives]] and [[Open-source model|open source]] movements, pushes to make more and more information freely available to any user via the [[Internet]] or World Wide Web. In his [[Organization:CERN|CERN]] presentation, Murray-Rust stated that the WWMM was a "response to the expense of [scientific] journals", and he asked the rhetorical question, "Can we win the war to make data open, or will it be absorbed into the publishing and pseudo-publishing world?" Murray-Rust and his colleagues are also responsible for the development of the Chemical Mark-up Language ([[Chemistry:Chemical Markup Language|CML]]), a variant of [[XML]] intended for chemists.

==See also==
* [[Open Archives Initiative|The open archives initiative (OAI)]]
* The science of Informatics
* [[Chemistry:Chemical Markup Language|Chemical Mark-up language (CML)]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
*[http://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/person/pm286 The home page of Dr. Peter Murray-Rust at the University of Cambridge]
*[http://www.escience.cam.ac.uk/projects/mi/mi_call.html The Cambridge Center for molecular informatics]
*[http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/ahm2003/AHMCD/pdf/157.pdf An outline of the WWMM]
*[http://oai4.web.cern.ch/OAI4/ CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI4)]{{verify source|type=application to WWMM|date=December 2010}}

[[Category:Data management]]

{{Sourceattribution|World Wide Molecular Matrix}}