New Media Object - Biological/Chemical Structure

1 Description

Visualisation of molecular, chemical and biological structures is essential for all biological, chemical and medical disciplines. It would be very useful if these structures (e.g. in MOL or PDB format) could be embedded easily via the ILIAS page editor into learning resources, Wikis, questions etc., and then automatically visualised by an appropriate viewer like jMol (Java applet) or the more advanced ChemDoodle (JavaScript & WebGL based).
This could be realised similarly to the embedding of Flash Videos (FLV): after choosing "insert media", the MOL or PDB structure will be uploaded (or referenced via URL) and ILIAS should automatically recognise the file type and associate the structure with the viewer.

2 Example

The following example shows a "Protein Data Bank (PDB)" file (immunglobulin = "antibody") embedded in a HTML structure which was uploaded as ZIP together with jMol as a viewer and then unzipped: but, of course this way of embedding is cumbersome and unflexible, since the size of the structure view cannot be changed directly by the properties.