Computing is ^ ^ ^ H not about ^ ^ ^ H _ c o m p u t e r s I

any more/' writes Nicholas Negro- ponte. "It is about living/' I

Negroponte is professor of me- I dia technology at Massachusetts I Institute of Technology and I founding director of the Media I Lab there. The quotation comes I from his new book, "Being Digi- I tal," published last month by A1- I fred A. Knopf, New York City. I Becoming digital is what the in- I formation revolution is all about. I

Much has been spoken and I much has been written in recent I months reflecting on the meaning of the information revolution that seemingly everyone agrees has begun. The preponderance of the talk and writing has been generated by media fascination with the idea of an information superhighway. Speculation on what could be in store for American society as a result of the superhighway's further development can certainly be

Catch us on the web In keeping with the spirit of the information revolution, Chemical & Engineering News is making this special issue available on World Wide Web. It's on the American Chemical Society Web server. The ACS home page address is http:// www.acs.org. Click on "ACS Publications Division/' then click on "Hot Articles," and pick the article you wish to see.

The Revolution Comes To The

Chemical Community

Chemical Research 26

Electronic Publishing 42

Process Simulation 50

Business Activities 62

National Policy 72

credited with keeping the nascent information revolution prominently in the public consciousness.

But there is more contained in the idea of an information revolution than just ordering pizzas on the superhighway or getting movies on demand. Many sectors are involved, and the world of chemistry is surely one of them.

Chemistry has been undergoing computerization for a long time, with many of its activities becoming "wired." But for much of that time, computerization amounted to not much more than automation of traditional chemical tasks.

The point now, however, is that these endeavors have reached a place beyond computerization. What is traveling through the wires, fibers, circuits, and ether is information, and information is more and more being considered the subject of the exercisesome-

I thing that is generated, acquired, moved,

I and consumed. 1 It puts what is happening in a

different light. Wherever one looks today, ac

tivities focused on information are taking hold in the chemical communitywhether in research, process design, or sales and marketing. Taken together, they are beginning to transform the chemical world.

A major locus of that transformation is the desktop, where

I much of the information is gen-I erated and gathered and from

where it is transmitted. But a goodly portion of the activity involved at present centers on the Internet, the network of networks that has become a global medium of communication. Electronic mail flies back and forth. Files get transferred. Gossip as well as useful information gets posted on bulletin boards. And information is acquired from numerous resources via the Gopher sector of the Internet, a hierarchical system of file servers maintained by many parties on the network.

But probably what has caused the greatest excitement of late about the Internet is that area called World Wide Web. The web, or WWW, is a client-server system that links computers worldwide into a hypermedia universe. It enables users to transmit or acquire not only text but graphics, audio, and video files. Basically, a user maneuvers around the web via hypertext, in which a word, phrase, or icon in a document is linked by hypertext cod-

22 MARCH 27,1995 C&EN

I M Mfl H M H V I

http://http://www.acs.org

Monsanto World-Wide Web Server AbonTteg

!

-/-fry ^.\ >

Rotx Roty ing embedded in the document to some other point in the document or to some other document entirely.

Information has sometimes been defined as a step in the process of converting data to knowledge. In this scheme, "data" are seen as the accumulation of unrefined facts or results. Cleaning up the data and organizing it changes it into "information," something that conveys a message. Refining the information further, into intelligence, transforms it into "knowledge." Still, information is a relative term, since in this scheme one per-

Zoo ^33| Dotty

son's information is obviously another person's data.

However the word is defined, the chemist is in the thick of it. Never before has the chemist had so great an ability to generate so much information so quickly. Never before has the chemist had such a vast pool of information so readily available on the desktop. Never before has the chemist had so extensive an ability to manip

ulate and manage the information.

And it is only beginning. The revolution represented by these new levels of capability in chemistry has yet to reach into all areas of the chemical community

with equal intensity. Various parts of the community are at this point just feeling their way along, trying to decide what is economically and technologically doable.

Perhaps for most members of the chemical community caught up in the transformation, it is an exhilarating time, full of technological empowerment and opportunity. But for many, the change can be a painful one, requiring new be-

MARCH 27,1995 C&EN 23

M-^m. ^ ^ ^ H ^m B ^ ^ B I

INTRODUCTION

haviors and atti-tudes. For those whose jobs have been displaced by in-formation technology, the experience can be a wrenching one.

Regardless, ideas abound and informa-tion-focused develop ments are tumbling onto the chemical scene at an in-creasingly brisk pace. Those devel-opments are wide-ly divergent in their nature.

For the chemical re-searcher, they include, for example, new literature-searching capabilities and new ways of managing data and databases. New electronic tools are affecting the way that chemistry is done and bolstering change in the way research is conducted.

For the process engineer, the developments include new de-sign capabilities and ease of use for process modeling and simula-tion. They strengthen the already considerable attraction those tools have for use in integrating informa-tion flow in the corporation.

For chemical company business units, the developments include new approaches to sales, marketing, and distribution, as well as the coordination of legal support. And information tech-nology is playing a big role in the re-engineering of corporations toward horizontal organization. The technolo-gy is essential for global operation.

Although this issue of C&EN does not survey the impact of the informa-tion revolution on educational endeav-ors as such, higher education does con-stitute another realm of chemical activ-ity experiencing the repercussions of the revolution. The academic commu-nity has arguably been out front over the years in a number of areasuse of the Internet for e-mail and file transfer, for example. But it, too, is astir with the many possibilities now being made fea-sible by information technology.

"'ji**** Campuses are extensively networked for

students and faculty. Numerous chemistry departments, many of them with aid from commercial software developers, have installed molecular modeling and computational chemis-try laboratories. Likewise, chemical engineering departments have insti-tuted process modeling and simula-tion labs. Chemistry departments at many schools are experimenting with multimedia approaches to chemical education.

Moreover, chemistry departments everywhere are getting on World Wide Web. Home pages for the departments are sprouting throughout the network, some more useful than others, but there nevertheless.

In other activity, the American Chemical Society is sporting a new

home page on the web, with sections for many of its di-visions and activi-ties available or un-der development.

One of the latest ACS activities on the web is the introduc-tion of two formats for electronic advertising. For the first half of 1995,

they are being offered to select advertisers in Chemi-cal & Engineering News and Today's Chemist at Work. They will be available to all advertisers in these maga-zines later in the year and to advertisers in the 1996 edition of the ACS's Chemcyclopedia.

One service, the Ad-vertised Product Information Net-work, places color ads including graphics on the Internet using WWW software. These can include sound, video, or hypertext links to the advertisers7 own web pages. In the future, readers will be able to enter their names and addresses

"\ to receive additional informa-i s tion or to actually place an or-

der for a product. The other service, an Electronic

Reader Service, allows readers to re-quest, via e-mail, additional informa-tion for products and services dis-played in printed ads in C&EN and To-day's Chemist at Work. At the bottom of the print ads, readers are asked to send e-mail to adinfo@acs.org mentioning a code listed in the ad of interest. They will then receive up to three pages of additional textual information on the product.

All of these activities are just high-lights from a chemical world in a state of flux. Ifs a bracing and in some cases perplexing time for the chemical com-munity. In the following pages, C&EN explores some of what's happening as that community moves into the infor-mation age.

To paraphrase Negroponte: Comput-ing is not about computers anymore. It's about chemistry.

James Krieger

24 MARCH 27,1995 C&EN

mailto:adinfo@acs.org

INFORMATIONINTRODUCTION