ECM28

End of August 2013 the European Crystallography meeting (ECM28) took place in Warwick/UK. The crystallography community is certainly one of the most prominent scientific communities using our neutron and photon sources. The community is exceptional well organized with a long history of openly accessible scientific information and format standardization, and has developed a powerful set of standardized tools and workflows for data analysis and validation of scientific information in the field. To benefit from this highly valuable experience and to advertise our own efforts in the field, we have been in constant exchange on various topics. At this conference, Erica Yang presented the projects efforts in Managing Research Data for Diverse Scientific Experiments at the satellite symposium on Crystallographic Information and Data Management (slides). The program and mission of this symposium can be found here

The talk was followed by a presentation of Herbert Bernstein on Managing crystallographic data in facilities using integrated CIF, HDF5 and NeXus summarizing the efforts for interoperability between well established standards, stressing the importance to combine the best of CBF, NeXus and HDF5 for BigData management. A way towards concordance has been outlined and intensively discussed between CIF and NeXus members at the CIF/NeXus/HDF5 meeting preceding the CIF workshop.

The aim has been expressed to achieve a full interoperability between CIF and NeXus, such that NeXus becomes a IUCr recognized standard data format, with a standardized, IUCr validated NeXus application definition. It's certainly a major step towards a widely adopted meta-data standard for a large scientific community.