DFN Project Chemie.DE: Building an Internet Information Service for Chemistry

Paper presented at the 3rd IuK Workshop "Multimedia in den Wissenschaften" (Würzburg, March 3-5, 1997)

URL for this talk: http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemistry/papers/iuk97/

Purpose and Background

• Chemists are faced with complex tasks: analysis of substances, development of new products and prediction of properties, which require the application of computers to an increasing extent.
• Chemists are among the main users of computer power: quantum chemical calculations, molecular modeling, complicated simulations.
• The vast amount of experimental and theoretical data requires intelligent methods of information processing.
• Chemists can hardly cope with the flood of information available in the Internet and in data bases dealing with chemical or biochemical problems.
• Typical chemistry documents contain a substantial amount of non-text information: 2D and 3D molecular structures, spectra and mathematical formulas, which cannot be retrieved by conventional word-based search tools.
• Chemistry has a high demand of visualization calling for multi-media presentation: three-dimensional objects (molecules, crystals), representation of vibrations, kinetics or reaction mechanisms by means of animations or video sequences.

• Special presentation formats used in chemistry (Figure)

Aims

• Software
  • evaluation of public domain software for chemistry and biochemistry, pointers to FTP sites or offering on local site
  • data base of commercial software products for chemistry

• Internet Information
  • list of chemistry information servers
  • meta index of documents relevant to chemistry available in the Internet with convenient search methods
  • compilation of mailing lists and news groups relevant to chemistry

• Dates
  • calendar of German and international conferences and meetings

• Job Market
  • list of job offers and applications

Development Tasks

• development of search tools, search for molecular structures; tools for an automated classification of documents

• compilation and offering of specialized data bases, e.g.:
  hazardous substances, thesauri for technical terms, molecular structures, occupational safety, waste disposal

• specific transport protocols, chemical MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions): standardization of exchange formats

• development of tools, e.g. for conversions of formats, which may help in the use of software products

History and Current Status

Period of funding for the project Chemie.DE: 1996-11-01 - 1998-10-31

Current status (February 1997):

• Most of the hardware (PC-based) has been bought and installed.
• The WWW server software has been chosen and installed: Apache/1.1.1 with PHP/FI (operating system: Linux 2.0.27).
• Several data base systems have been considered, and PostgreSQL has been chosen for the construction of the software and URL data bases etc.
• Classification systems (attributes) for the software and chemistry document URL data bases have been discussed.
• First attempts of gathering chemistry documents by means of the Harvest Broker have been performed. The task of selecting those links to follow which are most relevant to the field of chemistry is not trivial.

Server Chemie.DE: http://www.chemie.de/ (under construction)

Concluding Remarks

• Chemists should use and make use of electronic media, i.e., they should read and also publish electronic documents.
• Chemists should consider online publication of scientific results; in addition to online journals, Ph. D. theses, diploma theses, talks and poster presentations could be made publicly available to a world-wide audience.
• Convenient and powerful tools for the creation of HTML documents or the conversion of existing documents (e.g., rtftohtml or latex2html) are available. Most sophisticated and flexible would be the use of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language); the linuxdoc system (offering a variety of output formats), now called SGML-tools, is freely available. See, for instance: Some Aspects of Presentation and Conversion of Scientific Documents (Online/Print).
• Scientific societies and groups should be encouraged to publish their newsletters online.
• Perhaps the installation of a central information and data service in Germany (as already available in some other countries, e.g. BIDS - Bath Information and Data Services) for the distribution of costly scientific information (commercial data bases and online journals) to academic sites might help universities to keep up-to-date despite decreasing budgets.

Project Team:

Acknowledgment:

URL for this talk: http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemistry/papers/iuk97/