Analysis of Ambiguous Information about Chemical Compounds in Online Databases

Abstract

The Wolfram applications enable direct access to several main information sources (databases) and enable the data to be analysed easily. This offers developing information literacy on authentic material in chemistry education. For chemical compound identification: CAS, CID and Beilstein Numbers are used. In this paper, the authors focused on the ambiguousness of carbohydrate identification using these numbers. Altogether, there are 1498 compounds listed under the CAS Number, whereas CID and Beilstein Numbers are not assigned to every compound with CAS. During the analysis, several hundred entries with duplicate records were found, providing ambiguous information about the compounds. The authors focus on ambiguous database records, further analyse the physical properties of two compounds with several assigned identification numbers. This approach offers a suggestion on how to work with this topic in education, offering fruitful educational content.