CIF

File Format
Name	CIF
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Scientific Data formats Chemical data CIF
Extension(s)	.cif
MIME Type(s)	chemical/cif

CIF stands for Crystallographic Information File and also Crystallographic Information Framework. They are promoted and standardised by the International Union of Crystallography. See Documentation and Resources for Users and Developers of CIF Software. The Wikipedia entry is "Crystallographic Information File".

The IUCr CheckCIF service can be used to check the integrity and cosistency of crystal structure encodings in CIF. There are many CIF file examples in the Crystallography Open Database.

The MIME type for the CIF file format is chemical/x-cif. The file extension is .cif .

CIF files encoded with the current version should begin with the 11 bytes #\#CIF_1.1 immediately followed by whitespace.