chemxseer.ist.psu.edu:8080/ChemXSeerGaussianSearch/

You probably won’t understand ChemxSeer. That is, you probably won’t understand it unless you’re used to wearing white lab coats and calculating moles and whatever else it is a chemist does. You see ChemxSeer is a molecular search engine. It searches for info on chemical matter, molecules and such on the internet. Besides that it’s got a handful of functions which allow one to scour documents in the chemistry domain. There’s a chemical entity search for identifying formulae and chemical names. There's something called the TableSeer which seeks out tables within documents from which to extract content for use in user queries. Finally we have a database function; the ChemxSeer database contains data which can be processed and stored in various formats: Excel, Gaussian, XML and Charmm. Metadata from the database is used to link the data to actual published articles which facilitates searching for the end user. Confused yet?

“Research in environmental chemistry is becoming increasingly collaborative and multidisciplinary in scope and approach. For example, within the Penn State Center for Environmental Kinetics Analysis (CEKA), researchers are taking a multidisciplinary approach to linking kinetic information in environmental chemistry across spatial and temporal scales. As connections are made among field observations, experimental kinetics, spectroscopic analyses, and model predictions, gaps in the information web will become apparent. Approaches to filling these gaps can then be addressed by the collaborative team. An easily queried, intelligent database will provide access to critically relevant data for a diverse community of users, enabling these users to achieve higher order scientific goals. In short, data collection and synthesis will lead to better science and improved education of scientists.”

ChemxSeer appears to be a valuable search tool for research and discovery. It facilitates collaboration and data collection. There’s definitely a niche for this.

How accurate is ChemxSeer? Will it prove as useful as it sounds?