News & Notices
The
XML Gold Book Online
The IUPAC Gold Book —the Compendium
of Chemical Terminology— is now available in an all-new
format, making this key resource computer and Net friendly. The new
version takes full advantage of new technologies based on eXtensible
Markup Language (XML) and provides efficient ways of browsing, searching,
and simply using this reference. The XML Gold Book is a milestone in
chemical referencing.
See for yourself, go to <goldbook.iupac.org>
The Compendium is popularly referred to as the
"Gold Book", in recognition of the contribution of the late
Victor Gold, who initiated work on the first edition published in 1987.
It is one of the series of IUPAC "Colour
Books" on chemical nomenclature, terminology, symbols and units,
and collects together terminology definitions from IUPAC recommendations
already published in Pure
and Applied Chemistry and in the other Colour Books.
The XML version is based on the
online PDF version that mostly corresponds to the second edition,
compiled by Alan D. McNaught and Andrew Wilkinson (Royal Society of
Chemistry, Cambridge, UK) and published in print form by Blackwell Science
in 1997. It also contains more than 200 new entries added by Aubrey
Jenkins after the publication of the last printed version.
Among the many improvements, the XML format enables generation of several
different presentational outputs tailored to particular needs. Also,
the indexes are improved, the number of internal links increased from
about 8 to more than 13 thousand, both chemical and mathematical formulae
are captured in computer readable form, and there are navigational maps
of dependence between terms.
The authors of the XML version are Miloslav Nic, Jiri Jirat, and Bedrich
Kosata from the Laboratory of Informatics and Chemistry of the Institute
of Chemical Technology, Prague.
Enter the XML Gold Book at <goldbook.iupac.org>
or <www.iupac.org/goldbook>.
> A review of this brand new product is published in Chem.
Int. Nov-Dec
2006 issue.
