ICSU Strategic Coordinating Committee on Information & Data

This is a public forum that invites community input on strategies and desirable practices in providing open and long-term access to diffraction data sets.

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JRH
Posts: 61
Joined: Thu Aug 11, 2011 1:59 pm

ICSU Strategic Coordinating Committee on Information & Data

Post by JRH » Sat Nov 19, 2011 4:08 pm

Dear Colleagues,
I commend to you the report:-
http://www.icsu.org/publications/report ... l_2011.pdf

This overview report very nicely sets the wider context for our own deliberations on seeing where we can improve our own efforts with diffraction data deposition. All of it is of detailed interest for us. Section 3.1 can help us put our own data volumes into the context of the data generating volumes now and anticipated in other areas of science; highlighted as you will see is the data challenge presented by the square kilometre array project of radio astronomy.

If we take our current biological crystallography depositions of around 60,000 PDB structures and the 500,000 chemical crystallography structures in the CSD and we were to consider each set of diffraction data images datasets of around 1 Gbytes each, along with a doubling of such deposition entries of some number of years (but not a decade), we can see where we stand with respect to this portion of IUCr community data output versus these other areas of data generating science activities.

I invite colleagues to select their favourite portions of this report in what is clearly an important initiative from ICSU, the International Council for Scientific Unions.

Best wishes,
John
John R Helliwell

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