A Satellite Symposium to the 28th European Crystallographic Meeting
University of Warwick, Coventry, England
Sunday, August 25, 2013
An important one-day Symposium to celebrate and develop the role of the CIF information exchange standard in crystallography: from diffraction images to structure solution, refinement, validation, publication and archiving. Speakers will explain how crystallography, particularly in its application to structure determination, is a field with supremely well developed practices in the collection, analysis, interpretation, publication and archiving of raw and processed data, and the structural information derived from diffraction experiments. These practices are so well ingrained that many crystallographers are unaware of how well we do these things, compared with other scientific fields. The Symposium will remind the crystallographic community of its great track record in data handling, and also anticipate further advances in data management, integration, validation and curation. Much of the community's success in information management arises from the Crystallographic Information Framework (CIF), a standard now entering its third decade, developed originally for small-molecule structural modelling but which is now used directly in many areas of crystallography, or informs the development of formal data definitions in others. New developments in the CIF standard will maintain our position at the leading edge of scientific information characterisation and exchange.