The Chemical Object Identifier; or, the freedom to identify chemicals
Egon Willighagen · 2008
IUPAC chemical names, SMILES and InChIs are too long. InChIKeys are not unique enough because of safety reasons ( you have a 1 in 10 billion chance of blowing up your building ; well, odds are actually much, much lower than getting hit by Osama or friends, let alone a car). Wikipedia URIs do not cover enough chemical space. However, we need short identifier. Why, actually? Computers don't care about long identifiers.