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Current dictionary status

Paula Fitzgerald (paula_fitzgerald@Merck.Com)
Fri, 3 May 96 9:28:28 EDT 

Hello folks -

As many of you know, we recently made an announcement about the mmCIF project
and the current status of the dictionary to several of the mailing lists that
deal with macromolecular structural issues.  I hope that the audience for
this mmCIF list is now somewhat larger than it was as a result, and I thought
it appropriate to let you all know what is happening right now.

In some senses, not a lot.  There have been a couple of issues raised on the
list recently, and Helen, John and I met last Wednesday night to discuss them.
I will respond to those questions in separate messages.

What is going on behind the scenes is work along the lines of neaten and
polish.  Brian McMahon, of the IUCr, has pointed out a number of inconsisten-
cies, both of style and content, between his most recent version of the CIF
core dictionary and the image of the core dictionary that is a subset of our
mmCIF dictionary, and we are in the process of sorting these out and making
the changes to bring the two dictionaries back into alignment.

Once we finish that task, we will release a new version of the dictionary -
this probably won't be until the end of May, as we are all doing a lot of
travelling in the next couple of weeks.  Those of you writing software need
not worry - the changes that we are making are almost all ones that impose
a uniform style on the definitions, or that clean up spelling and grammar
errors in the definitions.  There will be a few new data items here and then,
but nothing major.  Our next task will be to check all of the examples in the
dictionary, and to add examples where there are none currently.  We
anticipate finishing that task my mid-June.

We are looking forward to really declaring this all done by the end of June,
so if there are any issues you want to raise, now would be a good time to do
it.  But remember that you won't be getting any feedback for a couple of
weeks, until we all return from our travels.

I'd also like to point out to the Europeans on the list that the entire mmCIF
web site is now mirrored in England, at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/NDB/mmcif.

Thanks, as always, for your help -

Paula Fitzgerald
John Westbrook
Helen Berman

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