InChIs, are machine-readable, alpha-numeric char­ac­ter strings first devel­oped by Inter­na­tional Union of Pure and Applied Chem­istry (IUPAC),  Now the InChI Trust is car­ry­ing on the work to develop and expand the algo­rithms for open source acces­si­bil­ity of even more chem­i­cal structures.

From Today’s Knowl­edge­s­peak Newsletter:

“The InChI algo­rithm turns chem­i­cal struc­tures into machine-readable strings of infor­ma­tion. InChIs are unique to the com­pound they describe and can encode absolute stere­o­chem­istry. A sim­ple anal­ogy is that InChI is the bar-code for chem­istry and chem­i­cal struc­tures. The InChI for­mat and algo­rithm are non-proprietary and the soft­ware is open source, with ongo­ing devel­op­ment done by the community.”

“Since its launch in 2005, wide­spread take-up of InChI stan­dards by pub­lic data­bases and jour­nals has been observed. Today, there are more than 100 mil­lion InChIs in sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture and prod­ucts. Numer­ous data­bases, jour­nals and chem­i­cal struc­ture draw­ing pro­grams have incor­po­rated the InChI algo­rithm. These include the NIST Web­Book and mass spec­tral data­bases, the NIH/NCBI Pub­Chem data­base, the NIH/NCI data­base, the EBI chem­istry data­base, Chem­Spi­der and Symyx Draw.”