Tonge, Rzepa, Yoshida, page 14

Conclusions.

One of the more unusual sociological phenomena of Internet-based interaction during the mid 1990s was that scientific exchange could be conducted with no real awareness of the professional and accredited identity of the participants. The Internet-based Web is moreover now changing rapidly to include not only distributed document delivery services, but also the delivery of distributed computational resources. In a chemical context, that might include providing access to e.g.large amounts of data created by combinatorial libraries and high throughput screening, and integrated data management across the biological, medical and chemical disciplines. More particularly, these requirements will increasingly link with electronic commerce and will need to operate within secure and authenticated environments.

In this scenario, one can image the exchange of e.g.molecule objects which could be used to search databases, to start calculations, for inclusion in legal documents such a safety datasheets or for interrogating electronic notebooks or journals. We have presented in this article one model which could potentially be used as the basis for constructing such an environment. This environment includes the ability to create object components, which can be both authenticated and securely signed to create a trusted distributed environment. Whilst the need for such an environment is clearly essential for commercially oriented operations, it is also easy to imagine how it might be applied to the traditionally more open academic and university environments, where so-called identity branding is increasingly recognised as important. Potential areas of application would include virtual courses and tutorials designed for distance learning, where authenticity and accreditation are essential, interaction with and secure submission to molecule libraries and collections, e-commerce via chemical supplier catalogues, scholarly refereeing of and access to electronic journal articles, and conference organisation. We believe that as such models are increasingly adopted, the relative anarchy of the Internet during the period 1993-1998 will be replaced a much higher quality trusted environment of potentially far greater value.

Acknowledgements.We thank the JISC (UK) for their award of a JTAP grant, Hiroshima University Venture Business Laboratory for travel funding for HY and Christian Buysschaert of Belsign for help in implementing digital object certificates.