Materials alpha and scattering

[gmagno]

It's been agreed so far that a list of materials should be kept separately with materials absorption coefficients, something along these lines:

# id	name	alpha	description
0	metal	0.56 0.11 0.35 0.15 0.48 1.0 1.0 0.83	Some description about this material
1	wood	0.26 0.44 0.75 0.08 0.38 0.34 0.0 0.18	And so on
2	polymer	0.0 0.12 0.07 0.0 0.45 0.82 0.3 0.22	And so forth
3	ceramic	0.6 0.4 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.19 0.14	Ceramic material from Uranus
4	cloth	0.36 0.77 0.44 0.21 0.37 0.6 0.71 1.0	Cloth

Question: should this data base maintain the list of scattering coefficients as well? What are the implications/advantages/disadvantages of keeping it outside/inside the same file?