OVERVIEW

Chemisches Zentralblatt is the world’s oldest journal of German chemical abstracts from 1830 to 1969. Only available in German, the compendium was challenging to search. In 2016, CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, introduced a new solution, ChemZent^TM, developed in partnership with Iconic, unlocking 3 million abstracts of valuable, historical scientific information in English.

THE CHALLENGE

It was difficult to explore and identify foundational chemical information in the original German hardback version of Chemisches Zentralblatt. Organisations were also missing access to the complete digital repository of the earliest chemistry history. To solve this, CAS turned to Iconic, tasking us with translation of the mammoth compendium from German into English for indexing and search.

HOW ICONIC HELPED

Iconic developed innovative machine learning technology to extend its existing Machine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions for the large-scale digitisation, translation and indexing of 140 years’ worth of German journals and patents. Customising proprietary MT technology for historical chemical information with statistical and neural approaches, Iconic also developed NLP technologies for digitisation of 800,000 PDFs, and extraction and fielding of 3 million abstracts by author and title. Iconic’s expertise together with CAS industry-leading scientific information analysis made the launch of ChemZent^TM possible within one year of idea inception. This foundational chemistry is now searchable in English with summaries in English as well.