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Modus operandi
- To: COMCIFS@uk.ac.iucr
- Subject: Modus operandi
- From: bm@uk.ac.iucr (Brian McMahon)
- Date: Fri, 17 Sep 93 14:55:22 BST
Dear COMCIFS members I append below a digest of the responses received so far (one) to David Brown's suggestions on procedural matters. Paula raises some points on this which are very relevant to the best way of handling our business. Because we are a technical committee, the bulk of our effort should go to working on technical matters, rather than refining points of procedure, but an early consensus on the most efficient way of doing business would let us get on with the job more rapidly - and I think it would be only fair to Paula, in particular, to be getting on with technical matters (especially with the rapid approach of next month's New York CIFtools workshop). So I again invite you to respond to David's and Paula's comments at an early juncture. Regards Brian ---------------------------- From bean@com.merck Thu Sep 16 20:36:40 1993 Subject: Reply to David's message To: bm@uk.ac.international-union-crystallography (Brian McMahon) Fellow committee members and consultants: I have read the message that we all received from David Brown earlier this week, and have some thoughts. David's comments really address two separate issues (mode of dictionary approval/upgrade and mode of communication amongst committee members) and I will deal with them separately. o Mode of dictionary approval I have no fundamental problem with the 6 stages that David has outlined (although I have to admit I find it depressing to think that after so much effort the macromolecular dictionary is still at stage 2). Having spent three years in the midst of this process, however, I realize that the process of dictionary development is not quite that cut and dried. I think that these steps underestimate the complications arising from two sources: 1) the learning curve associated with learning how to "write good CIF" and 2) the difficulties that come from building dictionaries as extensions to a core that is itself dynamic. 1) An enormous amount of time and effort would have been wasted with mmCIF if we had not had Syd to interact as we proceeded. Once you know CIF well, it becomes easy to "write good CIF". Until you know it, you do a lot of things clumsily, and some of the things that you propose are just plain wrong. We have to have a mechanism for providing a subcommittee council and guidance often during the stage 2 from a "CIF guru". Whether that role is played by a single individual (the role that Syd has played for me and my subcommittee) or whether that role is better played by the ComCIFS as a whole, is open for discussion. Perhaps this is what David meant by 2c) consulting with other members of comcif as may be required, but I fear that that underestimates the importance of this kind of advice. Someone with real CIF savvy (and a thorough knowledge of all of the dictionaries) has to be on call. 2) My mail of last week to the whole committee raised the issue of the relationship of a extension dictionary to the core. The particular issue was the *_intro items, but the issue is more general. The core does evolve, and it has to be prepared to evolve in real time with the development of each extension dictionary. A number of items originally proposed for the mmCIF extension have already been co-opted into the core, at which point the subcommittee lost control over the definition, examples, enumeration of that data item. There has to be someone in charge of the core, working closely with the subcommittees. Of course that "someone" could, and perhaps should, be the committee as a whole, but if we decide to handle it that way we must realize that this will mean being a very active and responsive body during the development of a new extension dictionary. I realize that I see these problems from the perspective of my own experiences and current situation. It may well be that the mmCIF extension dictionary is the most complex extension dictionary that anyone will ever have to deal with, and so these issues are local to this stage of the development of the CIF standard and will not be practical problems once we have a formally accepted mmCIF dictionary. But I have heard a good bit of talk about trying to extend the CIF paradigm to the macromolecular structures determined by NMR techniques, and I can assure you that these will be very real concerns if someone does undertake that task. o Communication amongst committee members I must admit that I rail a bit against all input going to Brian, and only being made available to the committee as a whole after been digested and summarized by Brian and/or David. I can assure you that given the volume of email that I receive, the volume increase resulting from messages broadcast to the entire committee will be negligible. Still, I am willing to give the mechanism a try. However, I reserve the right to ask that we reopen the issue of direct broadcast to the whole committee, if I feel that this moderated mechanism is causing my message to be lost or diluted, or causing delays in information dissemination. Again, my attitude about issue this may well be local to my current need to finalize the mmCIF extensions. I really do need help from you all, and in a timely fashion. Paula
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