Life databases

Source As derived from the PondFX Aquatic Life Database (http // www.ent.orst.edu/PondFX) and Barnthouse (2004). 

Medline covers primarily biomedical literature, containing more than 13 million citations (October, 2002) of articles from more than 4600 journals published since 1958 [18]. The database covers basic biomedical research, clinical sciences, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, pre-clinical sciences, and life science. Medline, a subset of PubMed, is a bibliographic database produced by the US Nationcil Library of Medicine (NLM). The database is available free of charge via SciFinder Scholar or PubMed [19]. 

Data-Star. This is Europe s leading on-line database service (39) and covers worldwide business news, financial information, market research, trade statistics, business analysis, healthcare / pharmaceuticals, chemicals / petrochemicals, chemical industry, biomedicine /life science, biotechnology, and technology, with an emphasis on Europe. It was originally formed as a joint venture among BRS, Predicasts, and Radio Suisse (the Swiss telecommunications company) (37). Data-Star offers access to about 300 bibliographic, abstract, directory, and fuU-text on-line databases, of which approximately 150 are also available on Dialog (40). 

An extensive pesticide properties database was compiled, which includes six physical properties, ie, solubiUty, half-life, soil sorption, vapor pressure, acid pR and base pR for about 240 compounds (4). Because not all of the properties have been measured for all pesticides, some values had to be estimated. By early 1995, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) had developed a computerized pesticide property database containing 17 physical properties for 330 pesticide compounds. The primary user of these data has been the USDA s Natural Resources Conservation Service (formerly the Soil Conservation Service) for leaching models to advise farmers on any combination of soil and pesticide properties that could potentially lead to substantial groundwater contamination. 

Risk and uncertainty associated with each venture should translate, ia theory, iato a minimum acceptable net return rate for that venture. Whereas this translation is often accompHshed implicitly by an experienced manager, any formal procedure suffers from the lack of an equation relating the NRR to risk, as well as the lack of suitable risk data. A weaker alternative is the selection of a minimum acceptable net return rate averaged for a class of proposed ventures. The needed database, from a collection of previous process ventures, consists of NPV, iavestment, venture life, inflation, process novelty, decision (acceptance or rejection), and result data. 

The CESARS database contains comprehensive environmental and health information on chemicals. It provides detailed descriptions of chemical toxicity to humans, mammals, aquatic and plant life, as well as data on physical chemical properties, and environmental fate and persistence. Each record consists of chemical identification information and provides descriptive data on up to 23 topic areas, ranging from chemical properties to toxicity to environmental transport and fate. Records are in English. Available online through CCINFOline from the Canadian Centre For Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) and Chemical Information System (CIS) on CD-ROM through CCIN-FOdisc. 

The ECOTOXicology database is a source for locating single chemical toxicity data for aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife. ECOTOX integrates three toxicology effects databases AQUIRE (aquatic life), PHYTOTOX (terrestrial plants), and TERRETOX (terrestrial wildlife). These databases were created by the U.S. EPA, Office of Research and Development (ORD), and the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laborator) (NHEERL), Mid-Continent Ecology Division... 

Statistical Methods for Nonelectronic Reliability, Reliability Specifications, Special Application Methods for Reliability Prediction Part Failure Characteristics, and Reliability Demonstration Tests. Data is located in section 5.0 on Part Failure Characteristics. This section describes the results of the statistical analyses of failure data from more than 250 distinct nonelectronic parts collected from recent commercial and military projects. This data was collected in-house (from operations and maintenance reports) and from industry wide sources. Tables, alphabetized by part class/ part type, are presented for easy reference to part failure rates assuminng that the part lives are exponentially distributed (as in previous editions of this notebook, the majority of data available included total operating time, and total number of failures only). For parts for which the actual life times for each part under test were included in the database, further tables are presented which describe the results of testing the fit of the exponential and Weibull distributions. 

In a predictive and reliability maintenance program, it is extremely important to keep good historical records of key parameters. How measurement point locations and orientation to the machine s shaft were selected should be kept as part of the database. It is important that every measurement taken throughout the life of the maintenance program be acquired at exactly the same point and orientation. In addition, the compressive load, or downward force, applied to the transducer should be the same for each measurement. 

There are many products based on these life sciences standards, such as the aforementioned gene expression standard that is used in Rosetta Merck s Resolver product and the European Bioinformatics Institute s (EBI) Array-Express database. The LECIS (Laboratory Equipment Control Interface Specification) standard is used by Creon as part of their Q-DIS data standard support (note that one of the authors was the finalization task force chairperson for this standard). 

Web in the life of the medicinal chemist. One may see the development of alerting services for the primary medicinal chemistry journals. The Web-based information search process could be replaced by a much more structured one based on metadata, derived by automated processing of the original full-text article. To discover new and potentially interesting articles, the user subscribes to the RSS feeds of relevant publishers and can simply search the latest items that appear automatically for keywords of interest. The article download is still necessary, but it may be possible for the client software to automatically invoke bibliographic tools to store the found references. Another application of the Chemical Semantic Web may be as alerting services for new additions to chemical databases where users get alerts for the new additions of structures or reactions. 

Availability of data - a lot of life-cycle data are available in both public and proprietary databases. However, the data that are available will usually be industry aggregate data... 

As an example, Baitz et al7 focused on different technologies and peripheral system conditions to reduce dust and heavy metal emissions from a refinery. They stressed that the knowledge of the sensitive life cycle parameters and a suitable database, and thus the possibility to quantify impacts, enables a sustainable decision-making in process design and process optimisation. 

Ecoinvent database by Frischknecht et al. (2006) v.1.3. Swiss Centre for Life Cycle Inventories, Switzerland. 

The Ecotox database provides single chemical toxicity information for aquatic and terrestial life. This is a useful tool for evaluating the impact of chemicals on the environment. 

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