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International
Tables for Crystallography Volume G Definition and exchange of crystallographic data Edited by J. R. Hester and B. McMahon © International Union of Crystallography 2026 |
International Tables for Crystallography (2026). Vol. G. Early view chapter
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Databases may be required to ingest CIF data from a variety of sources, and so must be able to handle input conformant with any format specification they support (Chapters 2.2![[link]](/graphics/greenarr.gif)
, 2.3
). They may wish to incorporate existing filter programs into their workflow (Chapter 5.4
), but they may also need to write a complete system to handle ingest, validation and database loading. In such a case, they may wish to build their own application programming interface, perhaps informed by the approach of the reference CIF API (Chapter 5.2
) or by some of the design decisions of existing CIF libraries (Chapter 5.3
).
Validation programs may be built to check all the constraints and relations expressed in dictionaries through the DDL (Chapter 2.4
) and dREL (Chapter 2.5
) languages. For correct interpretation of the ingested data, the definitions presented in all the relevant dictionaries (Part 4) must be studied. Data for a complex structure or system may be spread across several data blocks within the same file, and Chapters 3.3
and 4.3
provide guidance on how this might be presented.
Approaches to validation and, indeed, overall design and control of workflows of existing databases are discussed in depth in the chapters of Part 7.
