Subject: Announcement: new FSAtom work group on open standards for Molecular Mechanics

From: Konrad Hinsen <hinsen{at}cnrs-orleans.fr>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 14:59:09 +0200

The FSatom Work Group on "Open Standards for Molecular Mechanics" aims to 
bring open standards to the molecular simulation community, in order to 
facilitate the exchange of information, to eliminate duplicate work. and to 
aid in the comparison of results between different molecular simulation 
codes. 

The initial aim of the group is to develop open standards for describing 
structural information about molecular systems and for storing simulated 
trajectories. Such standardized file formats would facilitate the combined 
use of different simulation and analysis codes as well as the creation of 
archives that are useful to the whole community. Additionally, it would 
eliminate the need for the time- consuming and error-prone process of file 
conversion.

Standards are useful only if they are accepted by a sufficiently large number 
of programs. The work group currently includes developers working on the 
simulation packages AMBER, CHARMM, GROMACS, MMTK, and TINKER. Sufficient 
support of the newly developed standards can therefore be expected. 

The work group is open to all interested scientists and program developers. 
For more information, see

http://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/fsatom_wiki/MolecularMechanicsOpenStandards

About FSAtom:

The Free Software project for Atomic-scale Simulation (FSAtom) has the aim to 
spread the use of the ``Free Software'' concept in the community of 
Atomic-scale Simulation software developers, to improve the awareness of 
modern software engineering concepts, and to constitute the natural place for 
interactions between different groups of developers in this field. For more 
information, see www.fsatom.org.
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