CIF

The International Union of Crystallography is the sponsor of the Crystallographic Information Framework (CIF), a standard for information interchange in crystallography. The acronym CIF is used both for the Crystallographic Information File, the data exchange standard file format of Hall, Allen & Brown (1991) and for the Crystallographic Information Framework, a broader system of exchange protocols based on data dictionaries and relational rules expressible in different machine-readable manifestations, including, but not restricted to, Crystallographic Information File and XML.