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New imgCIF dictionary for review

The 2006-2007 academic year has been a time of increasing acceptance of the IUCr Image CIF (imgCIF) and Crystallographic Binary File Dictionary (CBF) dictionary, cif_img.dic. This dictionary extends the IUCr Macromolecular CIF (mmCIF) dictionary to handle raw synchrotron data images. There have been two very productive workshops, one at the ACA meeting in Hawaii in August 2006 and one at Brookhaven National Lab. in May 2007. A third workshop is scheduled to be held in August 2007 at BSR 2007 in Manchester and at Diamond. (For more detail on the workshops, see www.medsbio.org/meetings).

Because of this work, some improvements and additions to the imgCIF dictionary have been proposed. The axis system has been clarified and extended to deal with experimental setups that do not have goniometers. The binary format has been extended to handle additional compression types, and to handle maps and other 3D data. Comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The current draft of the dictionary can be reviewed as html at www.bernstein-plus-sons.com/software/CBF/doc and as text at www.bernstein-plus-sons.com/software/CBF/doc/cif_img.dic.

Comments should be sent to the imgcif discussion list (imgcif-l@iucr.org) or Herbert J. Bernstein (yaya@bernstein-plus-sons.com).

I. David Brown