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EnCOrE

Présentation

 

 

We would like to create an encyclopaedia of organic chemistry (EnCOrE) in English and make it freely available on the Internet. We foresee that the tool will be used by novice as well as advanced researchers from university and industry. It will allow cross-searches based on (i) Chemical structures and equations (ii) Explanatory texts (iii) Elaborated dictionary (iv) Pertinent keywords and (v) References.

Tho whom ?

The encyclopaedia will be used by first-degree students in directed learning, and will be available for them to work with on their own. It will be used by doctoral students in the same way, but with less direction. It will continue to provide the same function even to advanced researchers, both in academe and in industry. It will have contained within it enough of a database to fulfil that function too.

Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in academe and researchers in industry often need access to a new area of the subject beyond that which they learned as students. The first resources at present are a few books written at an appropriately advanced level and various encyclopaedias and compilations that lead the reader into the subject. We believe that our net-based encyclopaedia will be the first port-of-call for all these uses. Because it can be corrected and updated at any time, it will not go out of date in the same way as conventional books and collections of books. It will go beyond the textbooks, and beyond the single volume advanced books, but will not replace, at least in its first release, the larger compilations, to which it will provide leads.

Why ?

Organic chemists perceive their subject as intellectually highly structured, with many interconnected ideas. There are many quite different ways of teaching it, because there are many starting points, but the end result is often the same-a broad understanding and a shared but to outsiders opaque language. The sense of a logic to the interconnected ideas disguises the fact that there is a serious problem in making the subject truly systematic. Classifying all the known organic reactions, for example, into conceptually recognisable groups sounds as though it would be easy, but in fact, apart from some straighforward seeming groups, like oxidation, reduction, addition and elimination, the categories are not well defined. Even some of those reactions pose problems, for the oxidation of one component is the reduction of another, and there is therefore a problem in defining to which category any particular reaction belongs. Many concepts like these cannot, as yet, be rendered into a format that computers can manipulate, although most organic chemists will be blind to the difficulties, and probably surprised how little can be done beyond the calculations, the handling of chemical structure databases and the word processing that they are familiar with.

One of our aims is to try to reveal the underlying structure, and to achieve some systematic understanding of what organic chemists actually mean. For this reason and others, this is an immensely ambitious project, for we are not simply entering the data to be found already in the secondary chemical literature, and providing an index to it. There are already more or less effective ways of searching large chemical databases like Chemical Abstracts and Beilstein. Instead, we shall collect afresh the fundamental chemical information needed, as one would if one were writing a book or series of books, and enter it into the encyclopaedia, in order to format it and structure it to suit more flexible computer-based retrieval.

We expect that our finished product will allow students at all levels from first degree upwards to make connections that books and indexed databases are not designed for. We expect that it will contribute to the design of new ways of teaching, especially of organic chemistry, which has complex problems of having to handle words, chemical structures, mathematical formulae and experimental techniques, all equally important. We also expect that, by revealing connections that are not currently recognised, it will even expose areas of ignorance we are not aware of.

How ?

  • Mimicking the perceptions of the best experimental chemists to those of the best educationalist and designers.

  • Using a conceptual model which permits to dissociate messages and to integrate them into predefined stratums assembling the most descriptive to the most conceptual ones (experimental, stoechiometric, stereo chemical, mechanistic…)

  • Using databases of words, numbers, structures, connectors, texts, references

  • In a collaborative way involving the international organic chemist community

  • Involving a hierarchical organisation for collaborative work with several scientists from various disciplines (Organic chemistry, researchers in chemical computing, database engineering, linguistics, psychology, e-learning and communication), the AUREUS Pharma Company and the E-LeGI consortium

Collaboration