As part of the ECHET96 CDROM, and now included in our new virtual course (Scientific Information Components using Java and XML) I have written two e-articles on this topic: http://ala.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/java/epub/index.html These stress that there are many things which are not possible with paper and which, I believe, would be seen as essential to chemistry if they were fully implemented. A simple example is the 'supplementary material'. If properly marked up (as we shall investigate in the course) it then becomes possible to abstract numeric information (with scientific units, errors, etc.) or to refer to compounds and reactions automatically. This would allow questions of the sort: - find the forcefield equations in this paper, differentiate them once and twice and use them in my Hessian for minimisation (uses MathML) - find all syntheses in this journal, look up the molecules in our stores, order them if they aren't there, check their safety sheets and then tell the robot to make them. - extract the cell dimensions of all crystals reported in this paper and search them against the PDB. If any have non-crystallographic symmetry, diagonalise the matrix and report the rotation angle. The latter is already essentially possible. The technology is largely developed for the others, and requires the vision of authors, publishers and readers/experimenters. Otherwise we shall continue to dump all data to paper twice (or thrice) during the authoring/publication process and readers will continue to use rulers to capture data from published graphs :-) The attraction about XML is that it is being developed precisely to support this type of approach, including the mixing of different disciplines and the hyperlinking inside and outside of documents. P. <PLUG> There are still a few days left if you wish to join the course and find out more about these possibilities. See http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/ </PLUG> Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, ) Director, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham University, NG7 2RD, UK; Tel 44-115-9515100 Fax 5110 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/; OMF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)