The IUPAC manual of Symbols and Terminology for Physicochemical Quantities and Units (the Green Book) was first published in 1969. One of the fundamental principles of the IUPAC Green Book is the reuse of existing symbols and terminology, in order to enable the accurate exchange of information and data. Accordingly, there is a need for the IUPAC Green Book to be repurposed as a machine-processable resource. This paper reports an experiment where we define a syntax for the subject index of the IUPAC Green Book in the Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG) formalism. We repurpose the resulting Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) as the primary data source for a Ruby on Rails application and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) concept scheme. We demonstrate a metric that gives prominence to the most significant terms and pages in the subject index, and reflect upon the usefulness and relevance of the information obtained.

Extracting information from the IUPAC Green Book

240th National Meeting (2010)

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