The Need for Systematic Naming Software Tools for Exchange of Chemical Information

The availability of systematic names can enable the simple textual exchange of chemical structure information. The exchange of molecular structures in graphical format or connection tables has become well established in the field of cheminformatics and many structure drawing tools exist to enable this exchange. However, even with the availability of systematic naming rules, software tools to allow the generation of names from structures, and hopefully the reversal of these systematic names back to the original chemical structure, have been sorely lacking in capability and quality. Here we review the need for systematic naming as well as some of the tools and approaches being taken today in this area.