The following notice applies to this work as a whole and to the works included within it:
The Crystallographic Information File (CIF)[1] is a standard for information interchange promulgated by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). CIF (Hall, Allen & Brown, 1991) is the recommended method for submitting publications to Acta Crystallographica Section C and reports of crystal structure determinations to other sections of Acta Crystallographica and many other journals. The syntax of a CIF is a subset of the more general STAR File[2] format. The CIF and STAR File approaches are used increasingly in the structural sciences for data exchange and archiving, and are having a significant influence on these activities in other fields.
The IUCr's interest in the STAR File is as a general data interchange standard for science, and its interest in the CIF, a conformant derivative of the STAR File, is as a concise data exchange and archival standard for crystallography and structural science.
To protect the STAR File and the CIF as standards for interchanging and archiving electronic data, the IUCr, on behalf of the scientific community,
* holds the copyrights on the standards themselves,
* owns the associated trademarks and service marks, and
* holds a patent on the STAR File.
These intellectual property rights relate solely to the interchange formats, not to the data contained therein, nor to the software used in the generation, access or manipulation of the data.
The sole requirement that the IUCr, in its protective role, imposes on software purporting to process STAR File or CIF data is that the following conditions be met prior to sale or distribution.
* Software claiming to read files written to either the STAR File or the CIF standard must be able to extract the pertinent data from a file conformant to the STAR File syntax, or the CIF syntax, respectively.
* Software claiming to write files in either the STAR File, or the CIF, standard must produce files that are conformant to the STAR File syntax, or the CIF syntax, respectively.
* Software claiming to read definitions from a specific data dictionary approved by the IUCr must be able to extract any pertinent definition which is conformant to the dictionary definition language (DDL)[3] associated with that dictionary.
The IUCr, through its Committee on CIF Standards, will assist any developer to verify that software meets these conformance conditions.
[1] CIF:
is a data file conformant to the file syntax defined at http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/cif/spec/index.html
[2] STAR File:
is a data file conformant to the file syntax defined at http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/cif/spec/star/index.html
[3] DDL:
is a language used in a data dictionary to define data items in terms of "attributes". Dictionaries currently approved by the IUCr, and the DDL versions used to construct these dictionaries, are listed at http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/cif/spec/ddl/index.html
Last modified: 30 September 2000
IUCr Policy Copyright (C) 2000 International Union of Crystallography
The following Diclaimer Notice applies to CBFlib V0.1, from which this version is derived.
Portions of this software are loosely based on the CIFPARSE software package from the NDB at Rutgers university (see http://ndbserver.rutgers.edu/NDB/mmcif/software). CIFPARSE is part of the NDBQUERY application, a program component of the Nucleic Acid Database Project [ H. M. Berman, W. K. Olson, D. L. Beveridge, J. K. Westbrook, A. Gelbin, T. Demeny, S. H. Shieh, A. R. Srinivasan, and B. Schneider. (1992). The Nucleic Acid Database: A Comprehensive Relational Database of Three-Dimensional Structures of Nucleic Acids. Biophys J., 63, 751-759.], whose cooperation is gratefully acknowledged, especially in the form of design concepts created by J. Westbrook.
Please be aware of the following notice in the CIFPARSE API:
Portions of this library are adapted from the "mpack/munpack version 1.5" routines, written by John G. Myers. Mpack and munpack are utilities for encoding and decoding (respectively) binary files in MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) format mail messages. The mpack software used is (C) Copyright 1993,1994 by Carnegie Mellon University, All Rights Reserved, and is subject to the following notice:
The following notice applies to the message digest software in md5.h and md5.c which are optionally used by this library. To that extent, this library is a work "derived from the RSA Data Security, Inc. MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm".
The software in md5.h and md5.c is Copyright (C) 1991-2, RSA Data Security, Inc. Created 1991. All rights reserved, and is subject to the following notice:
Updated 23 April 2001. yaya@bernstein-plus-sons.com