Blue Obelisk is an informal group of chemists who promote Open Data

Open Data

Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "Open" movements such as open source, open...

, Open Source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

, and Open Standards; it was initiated by Peter Murray-Rust

Peter Murray-Rust

Peter Murray-Rust is a contemporary chemist born in Guildford in 1941.He was educated at Bootham School and Balliol College, Oxford. After obtaining a D.Phil he became lecturer in chemistry at the University of Stirling and was first warden of Andrew Stewart Hall of Residence...

 and others in 2005. Multiple open source cheminformatics

Cheminformatics

Cheminformatics is the use of computer and informational techniques, applied to a range of problems in the field of chemistry. These in silico techniques are used in pharmaceutical companies in the process of drug discovery...

 associate themselves with the Blue Obelisk, among which, in alphabetical order, Avogadro

Avogadro (software)

Avogadro is a molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas...

, Bioclipse

Bioclipse

The Bioclipse project is a Java-based, open source, visual platform for chemo- and bioinformatics based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform...

, Chemistry Development Kit

Chemistry Development Kit

The Chemistry Development Kit is an open-source Java library for Chemoinformatics and Bioinformatics. It is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac OS...

, JChemPaint

JChemPaint

JChemPaint is an editor and viewer for chemical structures in 2D.It is free and open source software, written in Java and so it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix systems...

, JOELib

JOELib

JOELib is a free software chemical expert system mainly used for converting chemical file formats. Because of its strong relationship to informatics, this program belongs more to the category cheminformatics than to molecular modelling. It is available for Windows, Unix and other systems supporting...

, Kalzium

Kalzium

Kalzium is a periodic table of the elements for KDE SC 4.It contains information about 103 chemical elements, including mass, charge, picture, discovery information, chemical and energy data, and a model of the atom. The table itself can be configured to display numeration, state of matter, and...

, Openbabel

OpenBabel

OpenBabel is free software, a chemical expert system mainly used for converting chemical file formats. Due to the strong relationship to informatics this program belongs more to the category cheminformatics than to molecular modelling. It is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac OS...

, OpenSMILES, and UsefulChem.

The project has handed out personal awards for achievements in promoting Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards. Among those who received a Blue Obelisk Award are Christoph Steinbeck (2006), Geoff Hutchinson (2006), Bob Hanson (2006), Egon Willighagen (2007), Jean-Claude Bradley (2007), Ola Spjuth (2007), Noel O'Boyle (2010), Rajarshi Guha (2010), Cameron Neylon (2010), Alex Wade (2010), Nina Jeliazkova (2010), Henry Rzepa

Henry Rzepa

Henry S. Rzepa is a contemporary computational organic chemist. He was born in London in 1950, was educated at Wandsworth Comprehensive School, and then entered the chemistry department at Imperial College London where he graduated in 1971. Following a Ph.D...

(2011), Dan Zaharevitz (2011), and Marcus Hanwell (2011).