CIF and its applications

Report on Microsymposium 96: Programming for CIF and related file structures

Of the five papers in this session the first two introduced the new flavour of CIF that is based on the dictionary language DDLm, and the last two described recent CIF applications.  Nick Spadaccini outlined the new features of DDLm , while James Hester showed how the algorithms encoded in the DDLm CIF dictionaries could be used to generate the values of missing CIF items at run time.  The importance of the relational structure of CIF for archiving was emphasized by Herbert Bernstein who showed that, while a relational file structure could readily be transformed to other file types, the reverse transformation was much more difficult.  Mois Aroyo gave an example of a CIF-based archive, the Bilbao Crystallographic Server, which stores information on space groups and space group relations, while in the final paper, Brian McMahon described publCIF, an editor for generating CIFs for submission to Acta Crystallographica.  He showed how publCIF can insert a short Jmol script into the CIF, thus allowing a  reader to use publCIF to retrieve the author's interactive view of the structure directly from the CIF.

I. David Brown