The globalization of crystallographic knowledge

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web provides major new opportunities for distributed databases, especially in macromolecular science. A new generation of technology, based on structured documents (SD), is being developed which will integrate documents and data in a seamless manner. This offers experimentalists the chance to publish and archive high-quality data from any discipline. Data and documents from different disciplines can be combined and searched using technology such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and its associated support for hypermedia (XLL), metadata (RDF) and stylesheets (XSL). Opportunities in crystallography and related disciplines are described.