Murray-Rust, Peter

Second, even if one can access the content of a journal article page, it is generally not in a format that makes it easy for a computer to process the information contained in it. In particular, the PDF format is most commonly used, in which chemical structures and spectra become images, and data tables become plain text. Maybe a journal article refers to a melting point of a compound that would answer the query of a particular scientist, but how would a computer locate this information in the text The cause of creating machine-readable versions of journal articles and other documents in the chemical sciences has been championed by Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa (2004), who have coined the term datument to refer to a document that is fully marked up in machine-readable form, so that meta-information about data is fully preserved. 

Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa. 2004. The next big thing from hypermedia to datu-ments, Journal of Digital Information, 5(1) 248. 

Peter Murray-Rust and Henry S. Rzepor, Chemical Markup Language, available online at http //www.xml-cml.org, accessed on August 14,2002. 

---