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The Compendium is popularly referred to as the "Gold Book", in recognition of the contribution of the late Victor Gold, who initiated work on the first edition. It is one of the series of IUPAC "Colour Books" on chemical nomenclature, terminology, symbols and units (see the list of source documents), and collects together terminology definitions from IUPAC recommendations already published in Pure and Applied Chemistry and in the other Colour Books.
Terminology definitions published by IUPAC are drafted by international committees of experts in the appropriate chemistry sub-disciplines, and ratified by IUPAC's Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols. In this edition of the Compendium these IUPAC-approved definitions are supplemented with some definitions from ISO and from the International Vocabulary of Basic and General Terms in Metrology; both these sources are recognised by IUPAC as authoritative. The result is a collection of nearly 7000 terms, with authoritative definitions, spanning the whole range of chemistry.
Some minor editorial changes were made to the originally published definitions, to harmonise the presentation and to clarify their applicability, if this is limited to a particular sub-discipline. Verbal definitions of terms from Quantities, Units and Symbols in Physical Chemistry (the IUPAC Green Book, in which definitions are generally given as mathematical expressions) were developed specially for this Compendium by the Physical Chemistry Division of IUPAC. Definitions of a few physicochemical terms not mentioned in the Green Book were added at the same time (referred to here as Physical Chemistry Division, unpublished).
The first reference given at the end of each definition is to the page of Pure Appl. Chem. or other source where the original definition appears; other references given designate other places where compatible definitions of the same term or additional information may be found, in other IUPAC documents. The complete reference citations are given in the appended list of source documents. Highlighted terms within individual definitions link to other entries where additional information is available.
from the Laboratory of Informatics and Chemistry of the Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague.
Please send any comments and suggestions regarding the functionality, usability and content of the electronic version to Bedrich Kosata.
from ICT Press.
The XML version was created as part of IUPAC project 2002-022-1-024: Standard XML data dictionaries for chemistry.
It is based on the online PDF version of the IUPAC Gold Book that is available on the Royal Society of Chemistry's website and mostly corresponds to the second edition, compiled by Alan D. McNaught and Andrew Wilkinson (Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, UK) and published in print form by Blackwell Science in 1997. It also contains more than 200 new entries added by Aubrey Jenkins after the publication of the last printed version.
As of the third preview release, we consider the Gold Book to be ready for public review. We are well aware that no project of the size and complexity of the Gold Book can ever be perfect, however, we are constantly working on improving it. Please don't hesitate to send any comments or suggestions to the maintainer, Bedrich Kosata.
2008-02-28: Release 1.1.2. Before a planned major update we have decided to publish a minor bugfix release. It contains fixes of several errors in the content and in the chemistry indexes. Also few obsolete indexes were removed and the source information for PAC articles were updated.
The complete version history of releases and preview releases is available on a separate page.
All main features were tested and work in the following browsers: Mozilla 1.7.3, Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer 6.0, Opera 8.0 (with minor problems with CSS) and Konqueror 3.4.0.
All pages on the IUPAC Gold Book website are valid XHTML 1.0 documents
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The following software was used to convert the PDF sources of IUPAC Gold Book to the HTML form and the authors would therefore like to acknowledge their respective authors:
| GtkMathView | Conversion of MathML to PostScript |
| BKchem | Chemical drawing and generation of chemical indexes |
| Graphviz | Link analysis graphics |
| Batik | Conversion of SVG to PNG |
| GhostView | Conversion of PostScript to PNG |
| Saxon | XSLT processing |
| Python | General programming |
Please note that the software listed above is not in any way related to or endorsed by IUPAC.
The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Cheryl Wurzbacher, production editor for Pure and Applied Chemistry, who made the second release possible by very thoroughly going through the whole Gold Book and reporting to us all the mistakes and errors that we made in the first release. We would also like to acknowledge the help of Eva Dibuszova, the head of ICT Press, with typographic and editorial issues.
Copyright © 2005, 2006 International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry