Open Babel Software
About
Open Babel is a chemical toolbox designed to speak the many languages of chemical data. It’s an open, collaborative project allowing anyone to search, convert, analyze, or store data from molecular modeling, chemistry, solid-state materials, biochemistry, or related areas. That means that Open Babel has two main pieces:
- Ready-to-use programs for interconverting, searching, modifying, and analyzing chemical files
- A complete programmer’s toolkit to allow easy chemistry software development
Heredity
In the beginning there was Babel, which translated between computational chemistry file formats. And it was useful, liked by many and lived many years. Eventually there was OBabel which never saw the light as a released product. But OBabel lead to OELib. This was open and free. OELib has now become Open Babel (C++) and JOELib (Java) and both will remain open, free, chemical software toolkits. As for Open Eye, they’ve created a closed, proprietary library similar to Open Babel called OEChem. So maybe it’s not an epic story. But it’s a continuing one. Open Babel is a community effort!
Download
Open Babel is distributed as a free software under the terms of the GPL. The current version for Windows, Linux and MacOSX operating systems can be downloaded from this file.
Citation
The preferred way to cite Open Babel software is :
O’Boyle, N. M., Banck, M., James, C. A., Morley, C., Vandermeersch, T., & Hutchison, G. R. (2011). Open Babel: An open chemical toolbox. Journal of Cheminformatics, 3(1), 33. doi:10.1186/1758-2946-3-33.