Role of the Internet in chemoinformatics: recent developments

With the explosive growth in the use of the World Wide Web, which provides a 'user-friendly' interface to the Internet, accessing information through Web browsers has become a common task for scientists seeking proprietary or public information. Corporate intranets have evolved as a primary infrastructure for the dissemination and access of proprietary information, so that researchers can conduct database searching and the calculation of molecular properties. Web browsers have become the common front-end to historically fragmented desktop applications and server information sources, and web-based applications have emerged to assist scientists in adopting this new paradigm. The communication of information among scientists now involves using URLs or direct links to html pages. Consequently, the Web has changed the way scientists think and function and has become an essential part of our daily lives. It has begun to eliminate hardcopy information within companies, eg, phone lists (that rapidly become out of date) and corporate organizational charts, and has permitted integrated access to previously scattered information sources. Finally, it has joined e-mail as one of the most essential productivity tools in our highly dynamic corporate world. Whilst there is a tremendous volume of material about bioinformatics on the Internet, this review focuses specifically on cheminformatics. It references both chemical information resources on the Internet and updates on Web-based tools that provide different means for accessing and using chemical information on both the Internet and corporate intranets.