Changes in our field

• The representation problem is (mostly) historical
  ... but what a legacy

• Storage/retrieval/display problems are still with us
  Data sources and producers as "network services"
  User interfaces as "web browsers"
  Security and data integrity issues

• These problems are getting easier!
  Doubling time of chemical information is ~20 years
  Doubling time of computational capability is ~2 years
  computer/chemistry sizes

• Chemistry is not the first science to go down this road
  Art becomes commodity
  Priesthood becomes proletariat
  Things work better, standards go up, other problems arise.

• Unification with neighboring sciences is possible
  Bioinformatics and genomics
  Traditional polymer chemistry
  Process chemistry
  Non-molecular chemistry
  Non-scientific chemistry

Future Daylight software

• Major simplification of information model
  Objects have properties
  Properties are objects
  That is all.
  Simple and powerful, but much work needed to make it happen.

• Unification of Thor and Merlin
  Archival/integrity handled by O/S
  Searching done via mmap/pthreads/FSMs
  Modern O/Ss, multiprocessors make this possible

• Encapsulation of cheminfo processing
  Back to RDBs: ORDBMS datablade (Informix) cartridge (Oracle)
  Up to "pure" ODBs and OOP interfaces (JDBC)
  Over to object brokers (CORBA)
  Down to small processes (e.g., transient databases)
  Producer/consumer identities get blurred

• Toolkit functionality remains intact
  Oopish programming interface was a good move.
  We'll keep it.

• Version 5
  Formal languages (e.g., SMILES)
  Unified thesaurus database servers
  Virtual databases
  Intimate with other types of databases
  Relationships as primary objects
  "EZ" API will be superset of "DT" API