A crystallographic database is a database specifically designed to store information about the structure of molecules and crystals. Crystals are solids having, in all three dimensions of space, a regularly repeating arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules. They are characterized by symmetry, morphology, and directionally dependent physical properties. A crystal structure describes the arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules in a crystal. (Molecules need to crystallize into solids so that their regularly repeating arrangements can be taken advantage of in X-ray, neutron, and electron diffraction based crystallography.)