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Page 4 of 9 Cerri. Chem Synth 2023;3:18 https://dx.doi.org/10.20517/cs.2022.37

To express the needs adequately, the following is a paragraph quoting remarks by Prof. Krief, founder of
[1,2]
EnCOrE, which he made when addressing the E-LeGI consortium during its meeting in Brazil in 2004 .
The author highlights a few issues and phrases that he finds particularly valuable:

“Currently, the information is only delivered flat according to a single point of view dictated by tradition of
‘book organization’ following the ‘Johannes Gutenberg age’ (ca.1400-1468). In fact, chemists’ brains work
differently, and the usual delivery message is context-oriented. There is a huge number of different contexts
which are covered, and it is impossible using a book or even a lecture to describe them all (experimental-
oriented, starting material-oriented, product-oriented, mechanism-oriented, stereochemical-oriented,
calculation-oriented...)... Not only methods and tools needed for each context are different (flasks, molecular
models, heavy calculation), but even the words used in each of these contexts are not properly defined.”

“The construction of the EnCOrE Dictionary is extremely important for our project. It will fix the language
and the related ideas and will play an important role in questioning EnCOrE. Its production is an act of
power. If this power is not well understood, the chemists will ignore it. For that purpose, it is extremely
important that chemists accept and use it. For that purpose, it should be elaborated through a collaborative
work implying discussions, contextualization, and consensus between the chemist’s community. We want to
archive the discussions in order to keep the dictionary always alive by reactivating the discussions on a single
word from time to time according to new needs. We believe that the times where confirmed chemists, sent by
their respective governments, were gathering in palaces sponsored by IUPAC (Union of Pure and Applied
Chemistry, https://iupac.qmul.ac.uk/) to build the compendium of chemical terms in a non contextual
manner, is over.”

The two fundamental messages from Prof. Krief were 1. the importance of words, language, and agreements
about the semantics and 2. the strong dependence of these on the context. Both concerns remain at the core
of modern informatics, thus encouraging a joint project. Prof. Krief’s vision of the future of chemistry was
one of a pioneer, without any doubt.

A crucial point concerns the difference between “information” and “knowledge.” We were perfectly aware
that it would be possible to build a repository of information, a kind of electronic library of concepts,
properties of concepts, and relations among concepts and their properties, often called “ontologies.” There
are many databases, particularly in chemistry; however, the goal of EnCOrE was much more ambitious.
Prof. Krief explained that he wanted to identify and implement a process of construction and use of
chemical knowledge, not merely chemical information.

For years, we discussed the difference between information and knowledge. We proposed a simple
definition: knowledge is information necessary and sufficient in the context of a decision. Prof. Krief agreed,
but simultaneously, problems emerged: the “context” where knowledge is exploited depends heavily on the
individual and their previous knowledge, goals, strategies, and tactics, in the case of an expert chemist
constructing the encyclopedia and when the knowledge is being exploited, whether by a student or an
expert.

After months of work on a small subset of chemical concepts (e.g., chemical equation, chemical structure,
element, functional group, named reaction, pure substance, retro-synthesis scheme, segment, reaction
vessel), a small encyclopedia was built; nevertheless, many different points of view remained unresolved
among the contributing senior chemists. However, the participants all progressed significantly in “learning,”
as described below. In retrospect, this failure led us to revise our plans: Prof. Krief and the chemists were