Hi Craig,

On 9/26/07, Craig James <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Recently on the OpenBabel-development mailing list, it was concluded that a 
> new
> SMILES specification is needed, created and maintained by the open-source 
> community.

Sounds like a very interesting project.

>   Noel O'Boyle wrote:
>   > Could I suggest this be coordinated under the Blue Obelisk umbrella?

Thanx, Noel!

> So here I am.  A first draft of a new SMILES specification is complete.  As 
> one of the two
> original authors of Daylight's SMILES chapter in their Theory Manual, and one 
> of the
> authors of the Daylight SMILES Toolkit, I felt uniquely qualified to get the 
> ball rolling.

Ah, maybe I may also invite you to clarify the meaning of the lower
case element symbols in SMILES strings? I have written up some
confusion I have about it on this page:

http://wiki.cubic.uni-koeln.de/cdkwiki/doku.php?id=smiles_aromaticity

(Obviously, I am very much interested in joining the design of the
SMILES replacement.)

> However, I must emphasize that my goal is to make SMILES a true community
> standard.  From the preface to the new (as-yet-unpublished) SMILES 
> specification:

<snip>

> 1. Where should the document be posted for review and/or editing?

The Blue Obelisk subversion repository sounds like a better idea than the wiki.

> On the Blue Obelisk
> SourceForge repository?  (And if so, where?  I was quite baffled trying to 
> find anything.)

Details are given on this page:

http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=195935

> Under the OpenBabel SourceForge repository?  On one of my own servers?

The community approach would suggest a public service.

> 2. What is the best forum for discussion about this document?  This mailing 
> list?
> OpenBabel's?  Both?

I second Geoffs suggestion to make a dedicated Blue Obelisk mailing list.

> 3. How does the community handle "membership" in a group dedicated to 
> creating a
> document such as this?  Is there a formal mechanism for creating some sort of 
> working
> group, or is it all ad-hoc?

Things are rather organic; people come and go as the like, but there
always is a core
community who cares and stays around. Because this new open line
notation standard
will be published, I anticipate serious interest from various of our
Blue Obelisk members.
I can imagine a situation where a few people act as editors
coordinating the writing effort.

Normally, before getting subversion write access, one would introduce
himself on the mailing list, before starting to hack on source code
(either document or program code).

Another thing we need to think about, is the format in which the
document is saved. One requirement comes to mind: the format should be
text based, so that SVN differences are human readable.

Options include: LaTeX, (X)HTML, DocBook.

Egon

-- 
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