The integration of Access Innovations's MAI-Chem chemical name identification and search system and Advanced Chemistry Development's Name to Structure will be a boost for chemical researchers
Access Innovations and Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs), both information management specialists serving the chemical, pharmaceutical, and related industries worldwide, have formed an alliance to integrate two of their software products used extensively in chemical research.
The integration of Access Innovations's MAI-Chem chemical name identification and search system and Advanced Chemistry Development's Name to Structure software will be a boost for chemical researchers, enabling them to more readily convert variations of chemical names found in large sets of data (such as a database of patent records) into visualisations of those chemical structures, and to then use the images as a tool for a wide range of research, business, and intellectual property management pursuits.
The companies said they will seek to develop a common interface for the two software products, and to jointly market the integrated products to each company's customers worldwide.
"This is a win-win for both of our companies and more importantly, for the chemical researchers and business managers we both serve," said Marjorie Hlava, Access Innovations's chairman and president.
"Integrating the two products will allow our users to accomplish more-and more quickly and with greater accuracy-across a wide range of chemical information and research management tasks".
Hlava noted that chemical research impacts numerous business functions, such as new product development, competitive intelligence, legal protection, marketing, and others.
Antony Williams, ACD/Labs's vice president, scientific development and marketing, added that the two companies anticipate robust acceptance of the enhanced joint product offering.
"Both the chemical and pharmaceutical industries face demands for accelerated product development cycles.
While doing so, they also have an imperative to be proactive in both the management and mining of their intellectual property," Williams said.
"There is a real need to increase the productivity of research activities, and the integration of our products may be catalytic".
Access Innovations's MAI-Chem is a chemical name identification system that gives researchers and information managers the ability to find and index, or tag, documents that contain variations of chemical names and compounds buried in large collections of electronically stored information, such as a database of patent documents, collections of in-house technical reports or an archive of professional journal articles.
It features a proprietary taxonomy that creates associations among words and phrases, along with a tool to index and categorise text through a sophisticated multi-phase approach.
ACD/Name to Structure software is a component of ACD/Name, said to be the only systematic nomenclature package available which integrates the ability to generate systematic nomenclature according to both Iupac and CAS Index rules and the ability to convert both systematic names and trivial names to their chemical structures. In addition to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, both MAI-Chem and Name to Structure are used by organisations and departments in the agricultural, chemical, geological, petrochemical, and related fields, as well as academia, government agencies, and professional service providers working in those arenas.
