On February 9, a Lycos search of 19 million World-Wide Web URLs found 29,053 documents containing the word chemistry. These documents allow users to study complete chemistry courses, to examine product literature, to demo the World Drug Index, to order chemicals, to list hazardous substances, to compute 3D coordinates from a 2D description (SMILES), to communicate with professional societies, to retreive supplemental material, to locate chemical patents, and to browse online journals.
University chemistry departments are providing faculty biographies, course descriptions and schedules.
Likewise, many chemical and pharmaceutical companies are using private internal web pages to distribute organizational charts, phonebooks, internal reports and research results.
Overnight, the Web has become a source of chemical news, a library of textbooks and lectures, a library catalog and more with the potential to revolutionize the practice of chemistry. Has it? Will it? Are there other or better roles for the Web? The Chemistry Information Exchange Working Group has been meeting to develop expanded roles for Web-based chemistry that will allow for the threading of applications to create active research software driven through a Web browser. This talk will review the current roles and report on the future possiblities for the Web in chemical and pharmaceutical research.