Chemical structure representation for information exchange

Information exchange is of primary importance in any scientific discipline but particularly so in such an information‐rich domain as chemistry. Chemists have developed a language of their own for representing information which is essentially graphical in nature: structure diagrams and reaction equations. Methods of converting this graphical language into a computer representation have been developed and efforts have been made to standardise such representations. This paper reports on these achievements and points out where further work has to be done.