Standard Data Formats for Experiments with Photons, Neutrons, and Ions

With the advent of increasingly complex experiments using photons, neutrons, and ions it becomes more and more important to store the data of experiments in a standardized way. The aims are to facilitate data exchange among scientists and access of evaluation programs to the data, but moreover to provide flexible and self-documenting means to integrate all relevant information of an experiment (acquired data, experiment description and parameters, meta-data) into a comprehensive data set. The task has two aspects: 1. Definition and structuring of the contents, 2. Implementation into a file structure and provision of corresponding software tools. The workshop will discuss details of the second aspect but it is mainly intended to concentrate on the first one because definition of the content and its structure serves as an indispensable prerequisite for implementation. Data structuring will be an issue that should be commonly solved for the different experimental techniques whereas content definition is partially common (e.g. instrument description) while in other parts it is differing from one to another experimental technique. Therefore, the intension of the workshop is to bring together IT experts and experts for the different key experimental techniques to discuss the general structuring of the data and to collect data items which are common to all or rather special to specific experimental techniques and experiment strategies. The key experimental techniques identified are 1. Protein Crystallography 2. Micro-Tomography 3. Scattering (SAS/WAS/GISAS) 4. Microfluorescence and Micro-XAS Part of the content definition is planned to be done in smaller working groups with representatives of the specific key techniques. Therefore, experts in those fields are cordially encouraged to participate in the workshop.