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Chemistry databases, one of the primary applications of chemoinformatics (Brown, 2005), are widely used and are becoming a powerful tool (Miller, 2002). Their efficiency and accuracy offer the chemistry researcher a convenient platform with which to acquire target chemistry information. The traditional compound retrieval is a basic simple search (Bunin, Bajorath, Siesel, & Morales, 2006) queried by a single term such as a formula, the numerical limitation of a property, a structural characteristic, and so on. However, these simple searches do not meet users' needs, especially when the database contains millions of records. In many cases, users attempt to query with multiple limits and need to visit several databases at the same time in order to obtain accurate results. This type of retrieval is called an advanced search or a combined search. Because an advanced search obtains a results set by scanning heterogeneous databases, i.e., a structure database and a property database, how to deal with the search speed divergence of different databases is an inevitable problem. Additionally, the efficiency and accuracy of the advanced retrieval is another problem that needs to be considered. Meanwhile, how to combine the separate search result sets is also a challenge.Currently, the design and development of the advanced search has had some successes. For example, the PubChem Project (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/), an open online chemistry database served by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), supports an online advanced search that gathers information about molecular structure, properties, chemical elements, and data sources. ChemSpider (http://www.chemspider.com/), another open chemistry database owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry, also supplies a similar advanced search function using a query that combines molecular structure, properties, identifiers, and other filter limitations.ChemDB (http://www.chemdb.csdb.cn/) is a free online chemical database integrating 24 chemistry databases maintained by 3 institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It supplies integrated information about a target compound, comprised of its basic properties, thermochemical data, mass spectrum information, and 13 other kinds of data. Currently, its available search methods include a basic search queried by Keywords: Combined search; Synchronous search; Asynchronous search; Chemistry database A combined search, which joins a slow molecule structure search with a fast compound property search, results in more accurate search results and has been applied in several chemistry databases. However, the problems of search speed differences and combining the two separate search results are two major challenges. In this paper, two kinds of search strategies, synchronous search and asynchronous search, are proposed to solve these problems in the heterogeneous structure database and the property database found in ChemDB, a chemistry database owned by the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS. Their advantages and disadv...

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A use case has been widely adopted for requirements specification, which can be created on a high abstraction level or a very detailed level. A use case with a very detailed level can be a lot more useful for requirements elicitation, but such a model may become too complex and difficult to understand the whole context. A use case slice is introduced in order to simplify the requirements analysis and ensure the correctness of software incremental development process (e.g., the agile development process). However, a use case is usually divided into multiple use case slices in a manual way. Some errors may occur during this manual process. In this article, the authors present an automated approach for dividing a use case into use case slices. The approach first decomposes a use case into multiple use case stories, and then these stories can be composed into different use case slices according to different requirements. These use case slices cover all the functionality of the original use case. The authors give a decomposition theory and propose the corresponding algorithm. A case study demonstrates these results.

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