Non-goals

atomref is intentionally narrow.

It is not trying to be:

• a general periodic-table encyclopedia,
• a home for arbitrary atomic or chemical properties,
• a structure parser,
• a crystallographic symmetry package,
• a structure-inference engine,
• a Voronoi / tessellation library,
• an environment-specific chemistry model,
• a machine-learning framework for extrapolating unseen chemistry.

The package is about curated reference data and explicit lookup policies. That includes provenance, transfer from broader support datasets, and stable API surfaces that higher-level scientific code can rely on.

Future versions may widen the range of supported reference-data families — for example X–H distances or radial atomic reference functions — but the package should still remain a small reference-data layer rather than a full chemistry platform.