ChemXSeer: An eScience Web Search Engine and Repository for Chemistry

Abstract

E-science or cyberinfrastructure have become crucial for scientific progress and open source systems have greatly facilitated design and implementation. In chemistry, the growth of data has been explosive and timely and effective information and data access is critical [Atkins 2003, Hey 2006]. Many have argued that cyberinfrastructures for science are domain sensitive [Snow 2006] and many have been proposed. We have proposed and are developing the ChemXSeer architecture, a portal for academic researchers in environmental chemistry, which integrates the scientific literature with experimental, analytical and simulation datasets. ChemXSeer will be comprised of information crawled from the web, manual submission of scientific documents and user submitted datasets, as well as scientific documents and metadata provided by major publishers. Information crawled by ChemXSeer from the web and user submitted data will be publicly accessible whereas access to publisher resources can be provided by linking to their respective sites. Thus, instead of being a fully open search engine and repository, ChemXSeer will be a hybrid one, limiting access to some resources.