Data‐sources for environmental chemicals: Databank of data‐sources and strategy for computer‐aided searches∗

A large amount of data‐sources exist in the Held of environmental chemicals. These are either manual sources like handbooks, tables, monographs, reports, reviews, company directories, or computerized databases. To facilitate the access and to retrieve the information wanted efficiently, we built up a “Databank of Databases for Chemicals (DADB)” which has 179 entries so far. For a comprehensive description of the content of a data‐source we developed a thesaurus that contains key words including not only environmental but also health and workplace exposure aspects. In support of data‐retrieval for online databanks and databases we developed an approach for predefined searches and a strategy for recommendation of optimal search paths. The background of this work is given by graph theory. The strategy of computer‐aided searches is shown for the criteria daphnia toxicity of chemicals in seven publicly available databases. The predefined searches are stored in our Databank for Computer‐Aided Searches (DCAS).