by - the Cambridge Structural Database - organic and organometallic structures;
- Inorganic Crystal Structure Database - inorganic structures;
- CrystMet Database - metals and alloys and
- Crystal Data Identification File - cell data for an additional 70,000 compounds not in CSD or ICSD.
Now there is another project which is worth talking about here. Unlike the CDS it is a relatively newcomer to crystallography. It is the COD, the Crystallographic Open Database, project. In many ways COD is a great idea as it is placing crystallographic information into a truly open access environment.
Here is some of their text:
Databases of crystal structure atomic coordinates (most of them commercial databases) delay new data by 3, 6 months, if not much more (1, 2 years) after the publication. As a crystallographer, you certainly are interested in having access as soon as possible to new and old data, and why not for free. Your main reason can be that you do not want to waste time in a structure redetermination of an already known compound. The Internet offers possibilities for quasi immediate answers, provided :We are not in the same situation as decades before when the well-known databases (ICSD, CSD, PDF) started. Today we have the Internet, fast computers, and a big pool of free available software. The question is : Do we have enough scientists who are willing to cooperate ?
- A small team of engaged scientists with some experience in database and software design coordinate the Crystallography Open Database (COD) project based on free and automated software
- for maintaining the database,
- for data evaluation and calculation of derived data (e.g. calculated powder pattern from crystal structures for search-match purposes),
- for browsing and retrieval.
- The authors (i.e. the scientific community = YOU) provide the project with database entries (note, that if you have'nt sold your experimental results exclusively, you are free to distribute the data to such a database, even if they have already been part of a publication - and a lot of good data have never been published).
The COD, once finalized, will be nothing else than a keyword-searchable Web server of crystal structure atomic coordinates, preserving the data after publication as well as unpublished data
So COD was started in March 2003 and currently hosts 73181 entries.
Could we do more to help COD and CDS?
I think the answer is yes we can. If we are a UK academic we should as a matter of course already registered to use the CDS. Even if we have a copy sat on a PC in our X-ray lab. Why? Well if your teaching your students to data mine from the CSD then they may end up in a University with no local CSD so they've not really be given access at the start to the tools they could use. The CDS can be accessed anywhere online via CrystalWeb or via SSH to access classic xterm interface tools so Conquest. This means students can search from home not just at work (uni).
COD of course carries many of the ideals which I like, in fact, many which are found in olex2 and other open source projects. That is it is free and open source/access. It is also community based and as you can tell I like the idea of community based things so much I built the forum. Yes the CCDC have done a great thing with their databases and they are a nice bunch of people but surely I should be able to search or access a structure without having to pay for access? If you are outside the UK you may find that your country doesn't have a CDS type service and as such you can't. So this is the point where COD steps in. Recently it looks like COD may be loosing steam, as their website has shown no new updates (not including entries) since December 2007.
Now an interesting crossover is that I'm sure CrystalWeb could search COD. Perhaps the people at COD should get in touch with the people at CDS. This would certainly increase the "value added" ability of COD and of course increase the data mine for CDS - CrystalWeb.
