DARC-CHEMLINK

Since the book was conceived new front-ends such as STN Express (26,55), MOLKICK (26,34) and DARC CHEMLINK (26) have appeared on the market. All are IBM PC based graphics packages which allow offline query formulation followed by connection to a host computer and uploading of the query for online searching. Offline query formulation means that an end-user can avoid the so-... 

DARC CHEMLINK (from Telesystemes) is a program which allows offline formulation of queries for submission to DARC data bases. Its structure drawing interface is intentionally very similar to that of the DARC system online. 

Offline preparation and presentation of chemical structure graphics is now possible on a PC using a variety of query editor programs (7), such as those listed in Figure 3. In most cases these are specific to a single system, and use a proprietary format for transmission of the query structure between the PC and the mainframe computer. For example, STN Express allows query structures to be built offline and then, after connection to STN, uploaded and searched against the STN online structure files. Retrieved structures can be downloaded onto the PC and browsed offline in STN Express. Similarly, CHEMLINK is now available for Telesystemes-DARC, while in the case of in-house systems, ChemBase provides similar capabilities for MACCS. 

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