1. Introduction

This document presents the foundations of the Daylight Chemical Information System, including our motivations and goals, theoretical discussions on chemical information processing and chemical database design, and insight into the inner workings of some of our algorithms.

At Daylight, our goal is to provide the best known computer algorithms for chemical information processing to those who need them. We provide these algorithms both as a Daylight Toolkit programmer's library and as a set of ready-to-use programs for the non-programmer. This document is meant to serve both groups as well as users of other products that incorporate Daylight's technology.

This document does not provide specifics on how to use Daylight applications and toolkits (see User Manual's, Programmer's Guide, and the man pages for this information). Rather, it is designed to help you understand how the software works. In general each chapter is written with the assumption that the reader has read the previous chapters.

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