San Leandro, California-based MDL Information Systems Inc and Palo Alto-based Dialog Information Services Inc are jointly developing software applications aimed at research and development within the chemical industry. The applications will use MDL’s client-server Isis software to search scientific and competitive information on the Dialog service, which containing over 450 databases, primarily in the business, news, scientific and technical areas, together with a company’s proprietary information systems. Isis will be the front end access to third party databases, such as those available on Dialog. In the post-discovery development phase of new products, chemists combine active ingredients with other components to add desirable properties to a product. The ability to gather data from as many relevant sources as possible, and combine it in formats that allow insight into the data’s significance, decreases the need to run tests to gain information that already exists for a particular compound. Or access to data can spotlight a dead-end to a research direction before a lot of time and money have been invested. The companies say the advantages of using its products in combination are three-fold: scientists will be able to access Dialog databases directly using the Isis front-end; information gathered from Dialog scientific databases can be combined with information from other sources, such as in-house databases; once the data has been gathered on the scientist’s desktop using Isis, it can be cut and pasted to other applications, such as spreadsheets, for further analysis. Isis is a client-server system enabling scientists to access and integrate data from multiple databases, view results, and communicate results to other scientists on a network – all from their desktop computers. Isis provides a visual, forms-based interface that enables scientists to easily enter queries for searching a variety of chemical data.
