The project's stated goal is:
"Open Babel is a community-driven scientific project assisting both users and developers as a cross-platform program and library designed to support molecular modeling, chemistry, and many related areas, including interconversion of file formats and data."
History
Open Babel and JOELib were derived from the OELibcheminformatics library. In turn, OELib was based on ideas in the original chemistry program Babel and an unreleased object-oriented programming library called OBabel.