The CIF2/DDLm Workshop will take place at the University of Warwick on 23-24 August, 2013. Participation in the Workshop will be by invitation only, in order to permit close focus on technical aspects of dictionary design and extensions to the CIF syntax and dictionary methods. Individuals with a strong interest in these topics but who are not known to the Workshop organisers are, of course, welcome to apply for such an invitation. The main topics of the Workshop will be:

• Introduction to the CIF2 extended syntax
• Development of an API to permit community development of open-source libraries and tools
• Introduction to DDLm, a dictionary definition language supporting algorithmic methods
• Discussion of dREL, a prototyping methods evaluator language
• Tutorials and demonstrations of JsCifBrowser, a CIF2 implementation in JavaScript
• Approaches to CIF dictionary authoring

The development of the Crystallographic Information Framework (CIF) since the late 1980s has been supported by the International Union of Crystallography, by database organisations such as the Protein Data Bank and Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, and by active software developers in academia and industry. Many of the original developers are now at retirement age, and research support within Universities is more difficult to obtain, in part because of the interdisciplinary nature of the work. COMCIFS is looking to new ways to secure the long-term vitality of ongoing CIF dictionary and software development.

Post-Workshop Symposium