The importance attributed to modulated structures in recent years is reflected by a rapidly increasing number of publications. Modulated structures can be considered as crystals of a basic structure with a periodic distortion. The distortion can be either displacive (variable atomic positions) and/or occupational (variable composition) in nature. In either case this variability reveals itself by the existence of so-called satellite reflections, often weaker than the main reflections of the underlying basic structure. The introduction of area detectors has enabled structural scientists to recognize these characteristic diffraction patterns more easily and with JANA2000 a software tool is available that allows to handle the resulting intensity data according to the specific requirements of superspace refinement. KNbOB2O5, a recent problem from our Application Lab, provides an excellent example for an understandable modulated structure, which, at the same time, fully demonstrates how to proceed with indexing, data processing, structure solution, and refinement. The underlying concepts of the superspace approach will be presented and discussed step by step via our sample structure. We believe that this type of project-based learning is a valuable addition to the traditional textbook method and will gain more significance in the future as the subjects of crystallographic teaching become more and more complex. Acta Cryst. (2002). A58 (Supplement), C187
Keywords: TEACHING METHODS MODULATED STRUCTURES SUPERSTRUCTURE
DESIGN OF MODULAR CRYSTALLOGRAPHIC LECTURES WITHXML BASED TECHNOLOGIES G. Schuck W. Steurer ETH Zurich Laboratorium fur Kristallographie Sonneggstr. 5 ZURICH CH-8092 SWITZERLAND Web-based courses in crystallography have become quite common. Since these applications are mostly HTML-or PDF based, we find often that content, structure and presentation are lumped together. HTML-or PDF presentations can be produced with standard scientific programs like Latex or Microsoft Word but sharing, reuse and modification of these data is impeded. That means HTML-and PDF based courses are somewhat inflexible and also devicedependent. Most of the web-based crystallographic courses have an auditorium with a very different educational background. Crystallographic lectures may be of interest for earth scientists, materials scientists, chemists, physicists or biologists. Consequently, we need different lectures for each target group and a high degree of flexibility and modularity in the teaching environment. In order to achieve such a flexibility, course modules may be prepared in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) [1], maintained in a repository and organized way using metadata based on standards like ARIADNE [2]. Markup descriptions are usually device-independent. The device-dependent information is stored in a separate description, called style sheet. The word 'style' refers to the mapping between the markup tags and the semantics. There are several proposed standards for describing style information like XSL (Extensible S...