CIF Applications. IX. A new approach for representing and manipulating STAR files

The Self-defining Text Archival and Retrieval (STAR) format provides a low-level data description from which Crystallographic Information Files (CIFs) are derived. STAR is independent of the two Dictionary Definition Languages (DDLs) currently used in crystallography, is used to represent scientific data beyond crystallographic data and is thus quite general. This paper describes an object-oriented approach to representing STAR files (OOSTAR) which is then used in several applications of importance to crystallographers. Applications are described for validating the integrity of STAR-compliant files, extracting subsets of data from STAR files and converting STAR files to HypcrText Markup Language (HTML) for use with a Web browser. SunOS 4.1 binaries, Objective-C source code and instructions for compiling and testing on other Unix-based hardware platforms are available via the World Wide Web from http:// www.sdsc.edu/pb/cif/OOSTAR.html.