PubChem released a Identifier Exchange Service enabling users to convert identifiers of different databases from one into the other. This is perfect, as PubChem is the central chemical structure oriented resource capable to convert identifiers based on the structure! In contrast, the services I implemented for the Golm Metabolome Database is just to small and is definitely not a global resource. The Chemical Translation Service is also not perfect, as it relies on text-matching and use PubChem downloads to build up the dictionary. The PubChem Identifier Exchange Service has the potential to save Bioinformaticians (especially in metabolomics) a lot of work, because converting identifiers is one of the major problems here.
But still PubChem's Service is not perfect as it is limited by the asynchronous FTP based Power User Gateway (PUG). Don't get me wrong, I love asynchronous programming! But is there any client application implemented initialising a http request, polling for results which are finally fetched via FTP?
