SoftNeSS'95 Workshop

[Ray Osborn]

Second Workshop on Software Development at Neutron Scattering Sources
                 SoftNeSS'95
       NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA (Sept. 1995)

One of the recommendations of the first Workshop on Software Development at
Neutron Scattering Sources (SoftNeSS'94), held last October at Argonne
National Laboratory, was to establish a standard format for the exchange
of neutron data among neutron scattering facilities and the user
community.  The reports containing this and other recommendations are
available as an ASCII postscript file from
ftp://ftp.neutron.anl.gov/pub/softness/softness_reports.ps or by
contacting Ray Osborn (ROsborn at anl.gov).

The meeting recommended that data be stored using HDF, a public
domain network-transparent database format developed by the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois -
Urbana-Champaign.  A draft proposal outlining the basic structure of
HDF files has been produced by Przemek Klosowski (NIST), Mark Konnecke
(ISIS) and Jon Tischler (ORNL), and is available as the postscript
file "hades.ps" in the same subdirectory as the SoftNeSS report.

We propose to hold a second workshop, this time at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) near Washington DC,
in September this year, in order to produce a comprehensive
proposal and settle a number of related issues.  Items on the agenda will
include

---- Discussion of the proposed file structure
---- Application to specific neutron instrumentation and experiments
       (e.g. triple-axis spectrometers, small-angle scattering instruments,
       time-of-flight spectrometers, real-time scans etc.)
---- Naming conventions for neutron scattering parameters
---- Provision of utilities and subroutine libraries for writing and
       reading the HDF files.

If you are interested in contributing to the process of defining the data
format standard, please let us know by sending an E-mail message either
to John Copley (John.Copley at nist.gov) or to Ray Osborn (ROsborn at anl.gov).
We ask that participants cover their own travel and accommodation costs.
The dates of the workshop will be finalized following the response to
this first notice, so please tell us dates in September that you will be
unavailable.

Please forward this message to anyone who might be interested.

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Dr John R. D. Copley                       Dr Ray Osborn
Reactor Radiation Division, Bldg 235       Materials Science Division
Nat'l Inst. of Standards & Technology      Argonne National Laboratory
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-0001, USA           Argonne, IL 60439-4845, USA
Tel: (301) 975-5133                        Tel: (708) 252-9011
Fax: (301) 921-9847                        Fax: (708) 252-7777
E-mail: John.Copley at nist.gov               E-mail: ROsborn at anl.gov