Structures Management System, DARC

Chemical data base systems, and especially the DARC Structure Management System (DARC-SMS), have from the beginning offered sophisticated capabilities for chemical structure registration and structure, or substructure, or generic substructure search. 

Examples of the second technique are Beilstein (currently with SANDRA on PC), MACCS (for storage and retrieval of structural data) and DARC-SMS (for storage and retrieval of structural data). Both MACCS and DARC-SMS can be coupled with general Database Management Systems (ORACLE, 1032) to store descriptive data. Other examples are CCSD, the Cambridge Crystallographic Database, PDB, the Brookhaven... 

Once many in-house, chemical structure data bases had been built, the users began to realize that it was more efficient to use commercially-available structure handling software for structures alone (or structures and a minimal amount of related property data) and to take advantage of data base management systems to handle property data. Molecular Design Limited (MDL) and Telesystemes modified their MACCS and DARC software, respectively, to allow for the appropriate interfacing of structures and data. 

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