CAS and InfoChem Enter Into Long Term Collaboration in ChemInformatics

COLUMBUS, Ohio, December 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

- World leader in chemistry content partners with leading chemistry software provider to create new technologies to enhance the discovery of chemical patents and more

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society and the world's authority for chemical information, today announced a long term collaboration with InfoChem, GmbH (InfoChem), a leader in chemical structure and reaction technology as well as datamining in chemical science documents, headquartered in Munich, Germany.

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Under the new collaboration, research teams at CAS and InfoChem will work together to explore the technology frontiers in the field of cheminformatics. For example, the joint team is now researching and developing technology to identify chemical information in text and to semantically enrich chemical information documents. The partners will also continue to focus on chemical substance information and the ways to extract, derive, store, communicate and interpret that information.

"We are delighted to expand our relationship with InfoChem to undertake research in advanced technologies in the chemical information space," said Robert J. Massie, President of CAS. Since 1997 CAS and InfoChem have successfully worked together in the area of chemical information content. "Chemistry, in addition to being the central science, is a global enterprise. CAS has strong relationships with scientific and commercial organizations around the world, and we are delighted to enhance our collaboration with InfoChem in their area of expertise."

With the project "ChemProspector" InfoChem was one of the participants in the prestigious "THESEUS" research program, an initiative of the German Ministry of Economics and Technology. The subject of this project was: "Advanced mining and searching of chemical content in patent documents". "We are excited to collaborate with the leader in chemical information, CAS," said Peter Loew, PhD, Managing Director of InfoChem. "This project will enable InfoChem to enhance our successful research and development from the THESEUS initiative and create significant value for chemists and the chemical enterprise."

About CAS

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, is the world's authority for chemical information. Our databases are curated and quality-controlled by CAS scientists and recognized by chemical and pharmaceutical companies, universities, government organizations and patent offices around the world as authoritative. By combining these databases with advanced search and analysis technologies (SciFinder® and STN®) CAS delivers the most current, complete and cross-linked secure digital information environment for scientific discovery. Learn more at http://www.cas.org.

About InfoChem

InfoChem GmbH, based in Munich, Germany, is a market leader in structure and reaction handling and retrieval. Founded in 1989, InfoChem focuses on the production and marketing of new chemical information products, including structural and reaction databases, and the development of software tools required for these applications. The main software tools provided are the InfoChem Chemistry Cartridge for Oracle (ICCARTRIDGE) and the widely used InfoChem reaction classification algorithm CLASSIFY. In addition, InfoChem provides tools for the automatic recognition and extraction of chemical entities and their conversion into chemical structures as well as the semantic enrichment of chemical science documents. Springer GmbH (Berlin) has held a majority interest in InfoChem since 1991. For more information go to http://www.infochem.de