Subject: Chemistry tools for the Internet?

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 1994 12:58:36 +0100

Dear netters

Cherwell Scientific is a specialist publisher of scientific software for the
Windows and Mac platforms. We publish programs in chemistry, molecular biology,
genetics, statistics, image processing, and other scientific disciplines. Our
programs are commercially marketed, documented and supported, with royalties
paid to the developers.

The Internet is wonderful but I wonder if there is scope for a good commercial
package which will make it even more useful for chemists

We do a fair bit of support for some of our programs by the Internet. On the
whole there is less of this for graphics programs. Presumably because the
handling of graphics on the net is still relatively problematic. Musing on this
and related matters it occurs to me that there is a need for a new chemistry
application. Let us call it the Chemists Information Manager. It would have
functionality in the following areas

(1) The efficient management of chemistry relevant file formats <molecule,
graphics, animation, smiles, etc>

(2) A lab-book or personal organiser functionality for ear-marking, managing
and
annotating information

(3) Some Tinformation agentU capability, so that the program could search and
locate resources on the Internet

If anyone has done significant work on such a project I would be very pleased
to
hear about it. It sounds as though some of this may be being done by WWW at
NIH,
see recent CCL posting.  I will summarise and post comments back to the list.

Best wishes

Adam Hodgkin
Cherwell Scientific
The Magdalen Centre
Oxford Science Park
Oxford	OX4 4GA
Tel:	44-865-784800
Fax:	44-865-784801
[email-masked]