Crystallography Online: the website of the International Union of Crystallography

Dear Sydney,

    I am planning to prepare a new version of the draft report on 
chemical items for CIF in which I will incorporate all the comments 
received, but one or two of your questions can be answered now for the 
benefit of the group.


>I regret the earlier
>item was not noticed subsequently among the excessive quantity of spam now
>received daily.
>
I have the same problem and I would recommend that people give an 
eye-catching subject in their email that will instantly identify the 
message as not spam - something with the letters CIF in it for example.

> However, members may well wish to see further details
>of the results
>agreed upon during the IChI workshop at NIST in November 2003. Are these
>expected to
>become available soon?
>
I have no idea if a summary is being prepared.  Steve Stein at NIST is 
the organizer of the meeting and he is the one who likely would put up a 
report.  I will pass the word along if I hear about such a report.

>In reading your first draft, however, it is striking that no mention is made of the
>proposed method(s) of implementing such a system, possibly because they seem obvious
>to the specialist. 
>
The reason for not discussing these detail is that they would need to be 
worked out in conjunction with the IChI group if the crystallographic 
identifier is to be incorporated into IChI.  I first want to establish 
the principles, then discuss their implementation with the IChI group.  
I sent a copy of this report to Steve and have had a very favourable 
response.

I will address the other points in your email  in the next draft of the 
report.

David

***************************************
I.David Brown, Professor Emeritus of Physics
Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M1
Tel: +905 525 9140 ext 24710
Fax: +905 521 2773
email: idbrown at mcmaster.ca
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