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Wiswesser line notation
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<p>Wiswesser line notation (WLN), invented by <a href="/facts/William_Wiswesser/u4ea9Hjt">William J. Wiswesser</a> in 1949, was the first <a href="/facts/Line_notation/sTqbIFmj">line notation</a> capable of precisely describing complex <a href="/facts/Molecule/N9ljSfFq">molecules</a>. It was the basis of <a href="/facts/Imperial_Chemical_Industries/XECoopCt">ICI Ltd</a>'s CROSSBOW database system developed in the late 1960s. WLN allowed for indexing the Chemical Structure Index (CSI) at the <a href="/facts/Institute_for_Scientific_Information/yjgKzIBG">Institute for Scientific Information</a> (ISI). It was also the tool used to develop the CAOCI (Commercially Available Organic Chemical Intermediates) database, the datafile from which Accelrys' (successor to MDL) ACD file was developed. WLN is still being extensively used by BARK Information Services. Descriptions of how to encode molecules as WLN have been published in several books. </p>