I recently wrote a couple of Applescripts that use the Chemical Identifier Resolver (CIR) a web service that performs various chemical name to structure conversions and it occurred to me that is should be possible to use this service to generate images for use as popups on a graph in the same way that I’ve previously described using Flot and ChemSpider. This works well but relies on the structure already being in the ChemSpider database, for novel structures we need a service for generating the image from a chemical identifier. CIR provides a simple web service for doing exactly this, for example submit a SMILES string and it can return a 2D image.

This tutorial shows how to create an interactive plot using Flot and CIR