Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 2, Issue 4; April 2001

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

News:


Special Libraries Association: The Special Libraries Association is a society of specialist libraries, based in the US. It has a Chemistry Division.
ACS Chemcyclopedia on-line: A buyers guide to commercially available chemicals, run by the American Chemical Society
SciDex: SciDex is a software system which can organize scientific data, information and knowledge. It is an object-oriented database management system which can include in only one system knowledge and rules from Chemistry , Biology, Physics, etc. The first applications are: a database on Silicon NMR; Chirbase/GC and Chirbase/CE, database on the gc and ce separation of enantiomers; Landolt-Börnstein - index of organic compounds; and CLAKS, Chemicals Kataster Online System.
Globus: The Globus project is developing fundamental technologies needed to build computational grids. Grids are persistent environments that enable software applications to integrate instruments, displays, computational and information resources that are managed by diverse organizations in widespread locations. The Globus project provides a toolkit, software tools that make it easier to build computational grids and grid-based applications.
Xrefer: This site provides free access to over fifty reference titles containing more than 500,000 entries. The sources include the Oxford University Press dictionary of science and disctionary of scientists and the New Penguin Dictionary of Science.
Public Library of Science: Should the record of scientific research be privately owned and controlled? This site contains an open letter and a campaign to encourage this. The open letter begins:
"We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form. Establishment of this public library would vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific productivity, and catalyze integration of the disparate communities of knowledge and ideas in biomedical sciences."
EJI: A Registry of Innovative E-Journal Features, Functionalities, and Content from Iowa State University.
Enthalpy, Entropy and Heat Capacity calculation: HSC Chemistry is the world's favourite thermochemical software, from Outokumpu university. The calculations are based on an extensive thermochemical database which contains enthalpy (H), entropy (S) and heat capacity (C) data for more than 15000 compounds.
Perry's Data: McGraw Hill are making available 'the most complete database of Chemical Engineering information available anywhere!' comprising Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook, Lange's Handbook of Chemistry and Yaw's Chemical Properties Handbook.

Web Sites:

Project Gutenberg: A collection of books available on-line. None of these books are still in copyright. This generally means that the texts are taken from books published pre-1923, and includes the Bible, Shakespeare, the Declaration of Independence, Lewis Carroll, etc.
datagrid: DataGrid is a project funded by the EU. The objective is to enable next generation scientific exploration which requires intensive computation and analysis of shared large-scale databases, from hundreds of TeraBytes to PetaBytes, across widely distributed scientific virtual communities.
Peer-to-peer: Peer to peer working group is a consortium for advancement of infrastructure standards for peer-to-peer computing. Many companies, including Intel are interested. See also OpenP2P. There is a company called Peer to peer but does it have anything to do with peer to peer? Java is joining in with JXTA.