The Scope of Chemoinformatics

All three tasks are generally too complicated to be solved from first principles. They are, therefore, tackled by making use of prior information, and of information that has been condensed into knowledge. The amount of information that has to be processed is often quite large. At present, more than 41 million different compounds are known all have a series of properties, physical, chemical, or biological all can be made in many different ways, by a wide range of reactions all can be characterized by a host of spectra. This immense amount of information can be processed only by electronic means, by the power of the computer. 

It was reahzed quite some decades ago that the amount of information accumulated by chemists can, in the long run, be made accessible to the scientific community only in electronic form in other words, it has to be stored in databases. This new field, which deals with the storage, the manipulation, and the processing of chemical information, was emerging without a proper name. In most cases, the scientists active in the field said they were working in Chemical Information . However, as this term did not make a distinction between librarianship and the development of computer methods, some scientists said they were working in Computer Chemistry to stress the importance they attributed to the use of the computer for processing chemical information. However, the latter term could easily be confused with Computational Chemistry, which is perceived by others to be more limited to theoretical quantum mechanical calculations. 

Since then, the application of methods of computer science, or informatics as it is called in many languages, to the solution of chemical problems has ventured into many more areas of chemistry. So broad are the applications of informatics, and its foundation, mathematics, in chemistry that no longer can any single conference cover the entire field. 

The tenn Chemoinformatics appeared only quite recently. Here are some of the first dtings  

Paris (August 1999 Meeting of the American Chemical Society), quoted by W. Warrat http ffwww. warn com/warrzone. htm 

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