schema definition system

A system is a root level object in a PIF record. Systems contain three general categories of information:

• Identifiers - What is this?
• Preparation - How was this made?
• Properties - How does this perform and what are its characteristics?

Additionally, systems can contain publication information for the system, contact information for people that worked on or the system, and licensing information.

A System object is the most generic root object in a PIF record and contains fields that could apply to any physical system. For more specialized use cases, the System type is sub-classed and fields appropriate to that use case are added. For example, ChemicalSystem contains all of the fields in System, but also adds fields for composition and chemical formula.