Prior to the development of the InChI identifier chemical information systems and databases used a wide variety of (generally proprietary) identifiers, greatly limiting their interoperability.
With proprietary identifiers, oligo probes that are sequence identical may have different identifiers between manufacturers and even between different versions of the same company's microarray; and sometimes the same identifier is reused and represents a completely different oligo, resulting in ambiguity and potentially mis-identification of the genes hybridizing to that probe.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC International Chemical Identifierr (InChI™) is a non-proprietary identifier for chemical substances, specifically designed to be used in printed and electronic data sources in order to facilitate the comparison and linking of diverse chemical data collections.
The aim of the IUPAC Chemical Identifier Project (IChIP) was to establish a unique label, the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI), which would be a non-proprietary identifier for chemical substances that could be used in printed and electronic data sources thus enabling easier linking of diverse data compilations and unambiguous identification of chemical substances.
These severe drawbacks were among the factors that led to the creation of the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) in order to create a freely available, non-proprietary identifier to allow the easier linking of data compilations and the unambiguous identification of chemical substances [31].
This note outlines the initial development of a program to generate the non-proprietary International Identifier for Reactions (RInChI).
Among these is the development of a non-proprietary, international identifier for reactions (RInChI) [4] to describe chemical reactions in a unique machine-readable character string based on the InChI algorithm suitable for data storage and indexing.
InChI is a non-proprietary, Open Source, chemical identifier intended to be an IUPAC approved and endorsed structure standard representation.
To address the lack of a non-proprietary, strictly-unique standard chemical identifier, the InChI project was initiated in 2000 by two authorities well-known for establishing standards, IUPAC and NIST.
To do so, it has developed something it called the "Automatic Content Identifier (ACI)," which is proprietary technology involving over 300 algorithms that analyze, detect, and convert all the parts of a website.
The IUPAC InChI identifier is a non-proprietary and unique identifier for chemical substances designed to enable linking of diverse data compilations.
