Daniel Tyler
C371-Chemical Informatics
C371 Project Report
03 December 2001
1. The project was designed to make an old text, found in a select number of
locations, more accessible to the general public. The project was also supposed to help us gather an understanding of how difficult something so seemingly simple can turn out to be quite difficult and time-consuming.
2. Sources Used: Microsoft Access, Excel. Scifinder Scholar, Beilstein,
http://www.aist.go.jp/RIODB/SDBS/sdbs/owa/sdbs_sea.cre_frame_sea,
http://webbook.nist.gov/chemistry/
3. I was the organizational leader, responsible for locating the chemical names,
CASNs, and molecular formulas, and placing them in Excel format.
We met several times throughout the semester (mostly unofficial and rarely as an
entire group) to discuss what we had done. When we first decided which project
to do, we
familiarized ourselves with the material (Groth’s Chemische
Krystallographie) and discussed several options for how to organize a potential
database. After that was decided, we divided up the work load and worked
mostly individually whenever we could. After learning that we would not be
responsible for scanning pages, we redivided the work. On Monday, December
3rd, we met one last time to discuss our progress up to this point, and put all of our
work into Microsoft Access.
4. We had a lot of trouble with many of the hydrated molecules and salts.
Surprisingly, SciFinder Scholar, with it’s vast database didn’t contain many of the
molecules. I personally spent many hours looking for a database which contained
more of these molecules, but I was unsuccessful. There are large gaps which still
need to be filled.
Personally, I’d also like to see the german text translated as well, but that’s a bit
much.
5. I believe that this can be used for a more advanced chemistry class (i.e. Graduate
level Organic where crystallography data could be used to ID an unknown). The organizational skills could be used in a very broad area of employment situations or classes.