Proceedings Papers
The Crystallographic Information File (CIF)
Authors:
I D Brown ,
Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, CA
B McMahon
International Union of Crystallography, 5 Abbey Square, Chester, UK, GB
Abstract
The Crystallographic Information File (CIF), owned by the International Union of Crystallography, is a file structure based on tag-value ASCII pairs with tags defined in machine-readable dictionaries. The crystallographic community publishes and archives large quantities of numeric information generated by crystal structure determinations, and CIF's acceptance was assured by its adoption as the submission format for Acta Crystallographica and by the obvious needs of the community. CIF's strength lies in its dictionaries, which define most of the concepts of crystallography; its weakness is the difficulty of writing software that exploits its full potential.
How to Cite:
Brown, I.D. and McMahon, B., 2006. The Crystallographic Information File (CIF). Data Science Journal, 5, pp.174–177. DOI: http://doi.org/10.2481/dsj.5.174
Published on
28 Nov 2006.
Peer Reviewed
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