Hi Kim, On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 03:04:27PM +0100, Kim Henrick wrote: > The discussion on archiving image data sets - > I guess that less than 1% of the image sets for PDB entries > are useful to software development (and can be got privately)
I would think much much more would be useful for software development: the 1% will maybe be the real difficult ones or the extremely high-resolution ones - which is interesting for development as well. But a large extent of software development goes into methods for the 'everyday' kind of structure ... the 99%. It is fairly easy for us getting hold of very difficult datasets and extremely good datasets: but try and find a boring, standard dataset. However, these are the ones that new methods need to improve upon as well. Otherwise we end up with methods and software that work for the 5 special cases a year and not all the others. We routinely use ALL the PDB entries (where structure factors are available) for running various tests and analysis (and I know other software development groups do this on a regular basis as well). If there was a mechanism for depositing raw images it might start in the same way as the deposition of structure factors: fairly small scale and only done by a few. It might not even have to start as a requirement (structure factors weren't a requirement either at the beginning afaik). But just having the possibility might open up new insight: not only into the particular structures or software development, but also into how to handel this data. And yes, I agree: a distributed system (a la doi) would be much, much better than a central system. At least the existing synchrotron or SG-center infrastructure could be re-used. Cheers Clemens -- *************************************************************** * Clemens Vonrhein, Ph.D. vonrhein AT GlobalPhasing DOT com * * Global Phasing Ltd. * Sheraton House, Castle Park * Cambridge CB3 0AX, UK *-------------------------------------------------------------- * BUSTER Development Group (http://www.globalphasing.com) ***************************************************************
