On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 12:54 PM, James Stroud <[email protected]> wrote:
> All that needs to happen is that the community agree on > > 1. What is the finite set of essential/useful attributes of macromolecular > structural data. > 2. What is the syntax of (a) accessing and (b) modifying those attributes. > 3. What is the syntax of selecting subsets of structural data based on > those attributes. > > The resulting syntax (i.e. language) itself should be terse, easy to > learn, easy to use, and preferably easy to implement. > Ah, but the nice thing about mmCIF is that it isn't truly "finite" - the PDB may limit what tags are actually included in the distributed files, but there is nothing preventing other developers from including their own tags, and there is a community process for extending the officially defined tags. Item (2) is very well-established, unlike the current chaos of REMARK records. I think (3) will be left to the various libraries to deal with. -Nat
