Gmelin Factual Database

CAS = Chemical Abstracts Service CT = connection table GFDB = Gmelin Factual Database ICSD = Inorganic Crystal Structure Database MF = molecular formula NIST = US National Institute of Standards and Technology STN = Scientific and Technological Network. 

Figure 1 Substance hierarchy in the Gmelin Factual Database...

Beilstein and Gmelin are the world s largest factual databases in chemistiy. Beil-stein contains facts and structures relating to organic chemistry, whereas Gmelin provides information on inorganic, coordination, and organomctallic compounds. 

Some other examples of factual databases are Gmelin, Specinfo, MDL, CHEM-CATS, ChemSource, etc. 

Factual databases are generally described in terms of the standardization of the data structure and the data content. In the case of the Beilstein file and CrossFire the following distinction is important to note, and will apply also to other major sources of factual data (e.g., Gmelin). 

Many chemists therefore take the view that the Beilstein and Gmelin files may be regarded as factual files, while the CAS and Derwent files are not. In the sense of the approach of the present article, this is certainly unfair to the latter pair, It is certainly true that in particular cases the generalized description of a property described in a generalized way in the abstract of a document may lead to valuable results which would be difficult or impossible to obtain without this form of soft data retrieval. For this very reason, Beilstein s CrossFire system has now started to include more and more soft data in the form of abstracts, titles, and other qualitative free text in its databases. 

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