On Aug 7, 2013, at 1:06 PM, Ed Pozharski wrote:
> On 08/07/2013 01:51 PM, James Stroud wrote:
>> In the long term, the MM structure community should perhaps get its inspiration from SQL
> For this to work, a particular interface must monopolize access to structural data.
Not necessarily, although the alternative pathway might be more idealistic and hence unrealistic.
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.
If such a standard is created, then I believe awk-ing/grep-ing/sed-ing/etc PDBs and mmCIFs would quickly become historical.
James
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