Research Seminar - May 06, 1998

Abstract

The International Union of Crystallographers (IUCr) has been accepting publication of data in electronic format for almost a decade now. It has developed its own format for such exchanges and at least one of its Journals now *only* accepts this format for validation. The world's exponentially growing resource of structural data on proteins, nucleic-acids and other chemicals/drugs is being archived in this format.

This talk will describe the STAR format and discuss work on expanding it to include "virtual data" using the Python language. Virtual data is a computational description of a data item that can be invoked to recover data missing from the original file. This will obviously have an impact on ongoing efforts to validate archived data.

Of course, importing what is effectively "active scripting" into such a venerable format while still remaining true to STAR's original aim of simplicity and flexibility is a sticking point. With this in mind I will contrast STAR with one of it's more recent "competitors" XML