The National Chemical Database Service (NCDS) offers Internet-based access to a suite of specialised commercial databases and resources relevant to the chemical and physical sciences. Based on consultation with the research community, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) selects resources to license and make freely available to all UK academic institutions via http://cds.rsc.org/ . Access to NCDS resources is automatically granted to UK academic institutions by IP address authentication. Off-campus access is granted via the Shibboleth Single Sign-On system, or via login credentials that are provided on request to any member of a UK academic institution. Alongside the provision of access to commercial databases, the RSC is undertaking development of a data repository which will allow researchers to deposit and publish data. Users will be able to browse the store of publicly-deposited data, thus increasing the breadth of data accessible via the NCDS. The key objectives of the NCDS are: • To provide UK academic researchers with access to best-in-class tools and databases which are, in many cases, central to their research activities. Due to the specialised nature of these high-value resources, many academic institutions would not be able to justify purchasing individual site subscriptions for access. • To centralise access to and user support for these resources. This facilitates many additional services that the RSC provides including streamlining access to the NCDS, ensuring the service is stable and consistent, developing and distributing training resources, raising visibility of the resources available, and maintaining channels of communication to publicise news and updates and solicit and respond to user feedback and needs. • To research and develop a solution for publishing UK chemical science research data.

New scientific knowledge in areas such as biology and biochemistry is being discovered at an unprecedented rate. In some cases, structured knowledge sources are available, in the form of semantic web markup or databases, but most scientific discoveries are still reported in thetraditional way, as journal articles or conference proceedings. Managing this vast amount of information, whether structured or unstructured, requires mapping between disparate knowledge sources, involving different nomenclature and relationships. Ontologies have played a critical role in addressing the challenge of semantic integration of such knowledge. Constructing ontologies is an extremely laborious effort. Not only must researchers agree on the concepts and relationships needed for a domain of knowledge, but they must also do so in a way that minimizes errors and is easy to update and maintain. There is therefore considerable interest in creating or augmenting ontologies automatically by analysing text. However, none of the research in this area has yet had a significant impact on the process of creating ontologies for scientific domains. In this short project, we intend to collaborate with a visiting researcher, Dr Inderjeet Mani, who is a leader in this field to look specifically at the issue of evaluatingautomatically created ontologies. Research in language processing in general requires good evaluation techniques to be agreed on by the relevant community. Without such techniques, it is impossible to replicate results and build on previous work in a motivated fashion. Evaluation of automatically created ontologies is in its infancy, which is hampering research in the area. The most effective way to make progress is by intensive discussion between different groups,backed up with small scale experimentation. Dr Mani's visit will allow us to improve on existing evaluation practice.