FAIRsharing record for: IUPAC International Chemical Identifier

This FAIRsharing record describes: Originally developed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is a machine-readable string generated from a chemical structure. InChIs are unique to the compound they describe and can encode absolute stereochemistry making chemicals and chemistry machine-readable and discoverable. A simple analogy is that InChI is the bar-code for chemistry and chemical structures. A hashed fixed-length version of the InChI, the InChIKey, is also widely used. The InChI format and algorithm are non-proprietary and the software is open source, with ongoing development done by the community. A number of IUPAC working groups are working on extensions and new applications of the standard.