NIAC Meeting - October 2006

The next meeting of the NeXus International Advisory Committee will be held at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory near San Francisco, California, USA. The meeting will be held from October 5 to 6, 2006, immediately following NOBUGS 2006.

List of Attendees

If you are interested in attending (and are not already on the list of attendees), contact [Andrew Götz] (Andy_Gotz.html “wikilink”).

Start of the Meeting

• You are responsible for your own breakfast and travel to the lab. In theory there are many people staying at the DoubleTree and the Durant so carpooling is encouraged.

• Arrive at the badging office and they will give you a visitor badge and a “blue triangle” parking pass. For those of you without a car there is a lab shuttle bus that will take you from there to building two (2).

• We will be starting at 8:30 am (pacific time) in building two (2) room 100B. This is the biggest room and will be where refreshments are served.

Agenda

Proposed Agenda Items

• Discuss NeXus collaborating with imgCIF. see MEDSBIO proposal

• Request institutes from the NeXus community sponsor a full-time technical secretary for next 12-24 months.

• Institutes that write NeXus files are data providers.. NeXus provides an interface between data providers and data requirers. Discuss if the NIAC constitution should be change to allow data requirers e.g. DANSE to have representation on the NIAC as a stakeholder that requires NeXus.

• SCAN definition similar to TOFRAW definition

• NXcharacterization needs to be formalized

• Finalize archive definition

Tabled Until Next Time

• Moving from Meta-DTDs to XML Schema. see NeXML proposal

October 5

• 08:30 Welcome and Introduction

• First buisiness

  • Review of NIAC’2006ILL minutes

  • Renew members

  • Add new members

    • Jens-Uwe Hoffmann - Hahn-Meitner-Institut Berlin

    • Paul Kienzle - DANSE

• Triage

  • Define missing agenda items

  • Vote on things already ready for voting

  • Define working groups and divide items

• 09:30 break

• 09:45 Ratify instrument definitions

• 12:00 break for lunch

• 13:00 Ratify instrument definitions

• 15:00 break

• 15:30 split into groups

October 6

• 08:30 Small items (see Roadmap)

  • Examine classes for ratification

    • X-ray Experimental (Synchrotron) raw NeXus data

    • Archive_Definition

• • Examine instruments for ratification

    • Monochromatic Neutron and X-ray Small-Angle Scattering

    • Reflectometry

    • [Time-of-Flight_Neutron_Indirect_Geometry_Spectrometer] (Time-of-Flight_Neutron_Indirect_Geometry_Spectrometer.html “wikilink”)

    • [Monochromatic_Neutron_and_X-ray_Triple-Axis_Spectrometer] (Monochromatic_Neutron_and_X-ray_Triple-Axis_Spectrometer.html “wikilink”)

    • Time-of-Flight_Neutron_Powder_Diffraction

    • Muon_Time_Differential

    • MonoXPSD Monochromatic Single Crystal Diffractometer with Position Sensitive Detector

    • MonoXSingle Monochromatic Single Crystal Diffractometer with Single Detector

• ??:?? Triage

General Information

Accomodations

LBL has a list of housing in the area: http://www.lbl.gov/Workplace/near-our-shuttle.html

The NOBUGS 2006 conference suggests two hotels: http://nobugs2006.lbl.gov/index.php?content=Lodging

Room Reservations

For help in locating the buildings with the meeting rooms, please refer to the http://www.lbl.gov/Workplace/lab-site-map.html LBL campus map.

Room	Session	Network	Projector?	10/5	10/6
Bldg. 2-100B	Plenary	wireless	no	7:00 AM to 6:30 PM	7:00 AM to 6:30 PM
Bldg. 6-2202	Breakout	wired	yes	12:00 - 6:30 PM	7:00 AM - 6:30 PM
Bldg. 7-211	Breakout	wired	no	12:00 - 6:30 PM	7:00 AM - 6:30 PM

Working Groups

API/Technical Issues

• Improving NeXus internal code documention on private structures and functions. Only API developer needs to know about these, but at the moment the knowledge is restricted to a few people. The existing in-code documentation needs to be tidied up and it would be a good idea if programs such as Doxygen could parse it.

• Move from the current CVS (for version control) / Bugzilla (for bugs/issues) system to using Subversion / TRAC. Freddie has set up two sites at http://svn.nexusformat.org/code and http://trac.nexusformat.org for testing

• Move mailing list to nexusformat.org

• Determine location to store definitions

• Design and implement a way to deal with having approved definitions and a way to modify a working copy on the website

• It would be useful if NeXus could support arrays of strings

• Source and target of a link must have same name

• Java package name should be org.nexusformat

Minutes

Here are the minutes in pdf format or MS-Word format.

Photos

• Group photos

• [ other photos] (NIAC2006LBL_photos_other.html “wikilink”)