Information about element species available on the Internet is not very easy to access via conventional text-based search engines. The reason is very simple: The term "speciation" is used in different sciences such as biology and chemistry and cannot easily be differentiated by these engines. Google will announce more than 4 Million hits for speciation and even "speciation analaysis" will result in more than 1.7 Million hits. Unfortunately, only a small part of these hits is really related to elemental speciation. As a cure to this problem, EVISA provides a Link-Database, giving direct access to relevant information available on the internet.
EVISA's Link database informs about information related to elemental species, such as:
- Physical, chemical and biological data related to elemental species
- Occurence of elemental species in the environment, food and biological materials
- Use of elemental species in industry
- Toxicity of elemental species (Human, Animal, Plant, Environment)
- Biological activity of elemental species
- Methods and techniques for the determination of elemental species (speciation analysis)
- Modelling of speciation in different compartments
- Remediation strategies for contaminated sites
- Rules, standards and legislation related to elemental species
- Politics amd positions related to elemental speciation
- Research groups and their projects related to elemental speciation
To access the EVISA LinkDB place your mouse pointer over the primary navigation bar on top of the EVISA homepage and position your pointer on the option:
Database. A secondary menu will appear, giving you the options to select one of the many EVISA databases (see figure below). (In case that you have disabled Java script, you may click on Database to get a secondary menu).
Clicking on "Links" will give you direct access to the
EVISA Link Database.
The search page of the LinkDB will appear that allows to specify the type of information looked for (see below).
By selecting the element of interest, the type of species, and the type of information, this database will give you very efficiently the required information. Let's see an example:
If you are interested in the toxicity of organic arsenic species, you select
Arsenic as an element,
Organic as species,
Information as topic and
Toxicity as specification. Clicking the
Search button will start your search and a short time later the hit page will show the results (see below).
In this case, 25 records were found, guiding you to relevant sites informing about the toxicity of organo-arsenic species. A click on one of the hits will pass you to the selected record. For example clicking on "
ATSDR: ToxFAQs for Arsenic" brings up the Link record on the ATSDR Database provided by the Department of Health and Human Services (see below):
By clicking on the Link below the title you will be directed to the database record (see below). Even better, any link within the description will direct you directly into the chosen part of the document (deep linking).
Do you know a faster way to find relevant information about elemental species ? Please try it yourself and visit the
Link Database
We are permanently adding records to this database. If you know about a useful web site that is not yet included, we would be happy to learn about it.
