Information Management
The rapid developments in chemical structure coding and searching has had a tremendous effect on the growth and applications of computers for storing and retrieving chemical data. The advances in structure-based applications have led to integrated chemical information systems–more and more of which have Web interfaces–and to specialized applications such as Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS).
One of the truly great achievements of modern chemical informatics research that ha s come from the use of computers is the ability to search large secondary databases such as Chemical Abstracts or Medline easily and precisely and to move seamlessly back and forth between the original primary journal literature and the abstracting and indexing databases is.
Just like in other fields, Chemists have developed their own communication system known as chemical nomenclature and structure systems. This system adds a unique dimension to informatics.
There is a confluence of activities in chemical informatics that is centered on the chemical structure (both 2-D and 3-D depictions). Two-dimensional chemical structural databases have evolved from traditional chemical structure diagrams into structure searching and substructure searching systems. In the late 1980s, attention turned to 3-D structure searching and representations of chemical structures in three dimensions. Recently, techniques for the full description of the conformational space of flexible molecules and similarity searching techniques have been discovered. These are now being incorporated into chemical information storage and retrieval systems.