Thanks for everyone for their kind words about the ChemLuminary award the iRAMP project received last week. It=E2=80™s exciting to see the Chemical Health and Safety and Chemical Information communities come together so enthusiastically to address this need. Those of us who have been involved in the Internet since it began emerging as a tool for people-to-people communications are excited to see the tools to support good use of this capability for chemical safety purposes develop. There will be more opportunities for both communities to participate in this project as it develops.

This weekend, I attended a family reunion where I had a chance to try to explain the project in lay language. After I did, one of my sons said "oh, so an chemical safety ontology would be like a standardized set of twitter hashtags". That makes sense to me; the goal is to develop a chemical safety vocabulary that will last longer than the average twitter hashtag.

People interested in potential next steps for the project may be interested in the editorial in the August 2015 issue of the Drug Discovery Today. It describes similar work that the Pistoia Alliance, a "non-profit precompetitive membership-based organization" is doing in exploring how to improve chemical safety in the life sciences industry. Early stages of this work were described at Tuesday's symposium in the presentation given by Mark Manfredi on Ensuring That Lessons Learned Are Not Forgotten: Leveraging ELN to Transform the Safety Paradigm.

The editorial can be found at
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.sciencedirect.com_science_article_pii_S1359644615002846&d=BQIGaQ&c=lb62iw4YL4RFalcE2hQUQealT9-RXrryqt9KZX2qu2s&r=meWM1Buqv4IQ27AlK1OJRjcQl09S1Zta6YXKalY_Io0&m=u_kapPE0TGQ6oeBIXaONytJ6DFNFg7uXwqLwFNQI8y4&s=szCD7Jzd8P7OK3FPIPUjV10Y1ZRzIy6pjw4xwsEjDY8&e=

Let me know if you have any questions about this.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
Chemical Hygiene Officer
Keene State College

ralph.stuart**At_Symbol_Here**keene.edu