Retrieval of relevant information in the area of chemistry remains a challenge. Recent progress in the area of information extraction technologies promises to solve a broad spectrum of problems associated with the time consuming tasks of “finding all relevant information”, “finding all relevant mentions and relationships” and “making all this information available to an entire community / organisation”. However, despite the attractive perspectives of fully automated information extraction, there is considerable discrepancy between the promises of vendors of information extraction technology and the true problem solving of real existing problems in the day-to-day work of researchers and patent specialists.