>It was started with about 2,000 patterns
>contributed by one of those monsters that Armel, among others, loves to
>hate: a money making corporation, The Dow Chemical company
ICDD is not supposed to make money, nowadays, if one believes the first
words at their Web site :
>The International Centre for Diffraction Data (ICDDŽ) is a non-profit scientific
>organization dedicated to collecting, editing, publishing, and distributing powder
>diffraction data for the identification of crystalline materials.
My opinion is that the main ICDD efforts are now to reconquer
organic chemistry. The presence of only ~ 20000 organic entries
in PDF-2 precludes the use of this database as a tool for
identifying organic compounds (of which 220000 crystal
structures are known). This means that many powder
diffractometers were not sold by manufacturers because
inorganic chemists did not find any inrerest in this technology.
Worst, a lot of inorganic chemists neglected crystallography,
by this way.
Let us hope that the inclusion of the CSD data as calculated
powder patterns in PDF-2 will reverse this tendency (need for
10-20 years ??), so that the cost of the database will decrease,
because of the increasing number of users. But this is not
sure, because I am confident in the ICDD efficiency in not
realizing profit at constant database cost in spite of increasing
samples sold : they just have to increase their own expenses.
Best,
Armel Le Bail
http://sdpd.univ-lemans.fr/course/
