Infochem, a German chemoinformatics software company, has applied data mining technologies to the oldest abstract chemistry journal, the German 'Chemisches Zentralblatt', digitised by Fiz Chemie.
The content covers research progress in pharmaceutical science and chemistry beginning from the early 19th century.
The new Chemisches Zentralblatt Structure Database enables combined full-text, structure and substructure search throughout a dataset of approximately 900,000 page images with about two million abstracts.
Researchers will be able to scan 140 years of scientific knowledge and patents published in the time period from 1830 to 1969.
Prof Rene Deplanque, head of Fiz Chemie, said: 'The Chemisches Zentralblatt Structure Database is not only a huge source of valuable findings in natural sciences still effective today, it is also a large pool of expired patents compiled into a collection by being published in the "Chemisches Zentralblatt".
'To have a comprised patent information source is essential for prior art searches,' added Deplanque.
Dr Peter Low, managing director of Infochem, said: 'Through the specific extraction and indexing of chemical names contained in the full-text documents, a completely new access to highly relevant facts is established.
'Chemists think in structures and, having the possibility to search for chemical substructures and exact structures, we enable them to retrieve information that was hard to find up to now,' he added.
Providing the information with the contemporary technology of a sophisticated chemical database allows for the advantages of modern retrieval.
Chemical names used for searches are automatically extracted and converted into computer-readable structures.
As such, non-German-speaking scientists are able to carry out in-depth research in the German literature.
The results can be displayed in detail with highlighted substructures.
Hits are linked with the pdf file of the original document.
The chemical names in the search are also highlighted in the pdf.
The Chemisches Zentralblatt Structure Database is offered optionally as a web application or as an in-house system.
The web application is hosted on the Infochem server.
Access is provided on a licence basis.
By purchasing the in-house solution, customers get the database together with the original pdf files to integrate them into their company systems.
Customised solutions are offered as packages.
