Challenges Award Announcement for the 2014 Best Open Source Cheminformatics Tool Contest

The journal Challenges and MDPI are sponsoring a contest aiming at identifying the best open source cheminformatics tool of the year. We are glad to announce that this contest has raised a lot of interest and many useful tools have been submitted for consideration. Whilst judging the projects we put a lot of emphasis on the possibility to display, predict and analyze data directly online, thereby enhancing the future of chemistry on the Internet. Due to the submission of a large number of high quality projects we did not come to a decision easily and consequently decided to split the prize in two - a first prize of 1,500 CHF (Swiss Francs) and a second prize of 500 CHF (Swiss Francs). We are proud to announce the winners of the competition:

First Prize

The first prize is awarded to Norman Pellet for his open source project "jsGraphs and jsNMR – Advanced Scientific Charting". These two javascript projects present advanced charting capabilities that do not only allow to display data with error bars in various formats, but also feature annotations, spectra display and assignment. Examples and the source code are available at http://jsgraph.org/ and http://github.com/NPellet/jsNMR.

Second Prize

The second prize is awarded to John Overington and his team for their projects "ChEMBL Beaker: A lightweight web framework providing robust and extensible cheminformatics services" and "myChEMBL: a virtual machine implementation of open data and cheminformatics tools". These great projects set up fundamentals for online cheminformatics services and sharing bioactivity data. The source code is available at https://github.com/mnowotka/chembl_beaker and https://github.com/chembl/mychembl.

The prizes will be handed over by MDPI during the Workshop on Chemical Information at the EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland on 12 September 2014.