CHEMXSEER: Cyber-Tools for Environmental Chemistry and Geochemistry

Research in environmental chemistry and geochemistry is becoming increasingly collaborative in scope and approach. A main goal of the geochemistry and environmental chemistry research at Penn State (and, indeed, across the world) has been the integration of experimental, analytical, and simulation results performed on systems from molecular to field scales in order to better approximate the complex physical, chemical, and biological interactions controlling the fate and transport of environmental contaminants. E-science or cyberinfrastructure have become crucial for scientific progress. We will report here on our development of the ChemXSeer architecture as a portal for academic researchers in the area of environmental chemical kinetics, which integrates the scientific literature with experimental, analytical and simulation datasets. ChemXSeer offers unique aspects of search not yet present in other scientific search services: for example, we will demonstrate tools for the extraction of tables, figures, equations and formulae from scientific documents. Ultimately, ChemXSeer intends to provide a wide range of features including full text search; author, affiliation, title and venue search; figure search; table search; formulae search; citation and acknowledgement search; and citation linking and statistics. In this presentation, we will detail our progress to date, and discuss the future goals and implementation of this platform. This work is supported by the NSF under grant CHE- 0535656.