"It is particularly fitting that a crystallographer should be so recognised during the International Year of Crystallography" is stated on the CODATA web site. Indeed, the CODATA Prize, a major biennial award which acknowledges outstanding achievement in the world of scientific and technical data, has been awarded to Professor Sydney Hall, who devised a universal self-defining text archive and retrieval (STAR) file format that evolved into the Crystallographic Information Framework (CIF), a momentous contribution in the area of data characterisation, and well known to structural chemists and biologists in particular as both a data and publications standard.

Read more on the IUCr or CODATA web site.