The internet now offers access to a myriad of online resources that can be of value to chemists working in the Life Sciences. While finding information online is, in many cases, a simple search away, the accuracy and validity of the associated data and information should be questioned. As more databases and resources are introduced online, and commonly not integrated to other resources, a scientist must perform multiple searches and then undertake the task of meshing and merging data. ChemSpider is a freely accessible online database that has taken on the challenge of meshing together distributed resources across the internet to provide a structure-based hub. It is a crowdsourcing environment hosting over 26 million unique compounds linked out to over 400 data sources. With well defined programming interfaces for integration ChemSpider has been integrated to many commercial and open software packages and is presently serving as the chemistry foundation for the IMI Open PHACTS project.