Cheminformatics: Mobile Workflows and Data Sources
Alex M. Clark · ACS symposium series · 2014
This chapter explores some of the ways that cheminformatics software is adapting to the overall industry transition toward consumer oriented mobile devices and cloud computing. While scientific software in general lags the trend due to high complexity and narrowly defined market segments, a significant amount of technical progress has been made. Mobile apps have solved the difficult challenge of providing a touchscreen user interface for drawing chemical structures, and have been demonstrated as effective ways to visualize structures (2D and 3D) and accompanying data. Effective strategies have been developed for accessing large databases using Internet protocols, as well as delegating intensive calculations to cloud-hosted servers. Mobile apps typically have a strong focus on data communication, due to their modular design, which makes it possible to execute diverse and heterogeneous workflows by concatenating the functionality of a series of apps to accomplish a given task.