NIAC meeting - October 2008

The next meeting of the NeXus International Advisory Committee will be held at Rydges Cronulla Beach Hotel in Sydney Australia on October 30-31, 2008. This is a satellite meeting of the NOBUGS 2008 conference.

Conference Fee

There will be a conference fee of AUS$130 to pay for food and the venue.

List of Attendees

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

Proposed Agenda

Thursday, October 30

09:00 Meeting commences

General Business

• Welcome and Introduction

• Review of NIAC’2007HMI minutes

  • NIAC Action Items

  • Open tickets

• Renew members

• Elect chair, executive secretary, and technical committee chair

• Discus what topics are most important

• [Mission statement] (Mission.html “wikilink”)

Lunch

CIF

• presentation by James Hester on lessons learned from CIF standardisation

Discussion of technology for describing base classes and instrument definitions

• Review Darren Kelly’s latest work. Provide feedback to Darren. - limited to one hour total

Other items

18:00 Adjourn for dinner

Friday, October 31

09:00 Meeting commences

18:00 Meeting adjourns

Discussion Items

• Roadmap for NeXus

Instrument definitions

• Should we store pixel corners rather than centres?

• Extending NXshape to handle Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) descriptions of the instrument (see last part of MantidNeXusWorkspaceFormat)

XML schema definitions

• Objective: why schema? - validation, tools e.g. IDE. Informative session.

• Pros and cons of xsd and rng

• Review of [current work] (Schema.html “wikilink”). (Overview)

• Vote on use of xsd.

• schema as a path to O-O NeXus

Reduced data storage

• review of canSAS 1-D v1.0 XML data format for reduced Small-Angle Scattering data.

  • Objective

  • Why not use NeXus?

  • How to merge/nudge community towards NeXus?

  • Next steps

    • 2-D and higher-dimensionality reduced data sets

    • How to standardize storage of results from data analysis steps and provenance

• Is the next big priority after schema to provide reduced data formats for all instrument classes?

• Proposal for storage of reduced data by the Mantid project (see MantidNeXusWorkspaceFormat)

Tech Group Breakout

• review minutes/decision of last NIAC and tech teleconferences

• Features for NeXus API 4.3

• XML schema review and implementation

• Review open tickets

• Python bindings:

  • Paul Kienzle’s new high level interface

  • Developing a “Open GENIE like” NeXus python application

• C++ bindings

• “Object oriented” NeXus

Documentation breakout

• review minutes/decision of last NIAC

• ACTION (from 2007 NIAC): How is the offline documentation produced?

• Is the proposed system of a snapshot of relevant mediawiki pages into DocBook at the time of a definition release acceptable?

• Discuss issues with mediawiki to DocBook converter

• Decide which mediawiki pages are required in DocBook format e.g. do we include the FAQ page?

• Is there documentation that is uniquely offline or online? This will become clearer with the mapping in the previous item

• should the representation of the base classes in the appendices be UML and/or table version?

• html to DocBook transform post processing - are these steps acceptable?

  • documentation transformed from mediawiki to DocBook, edited where necessary, chapters concatenated, and converted to pdf

  • pdf bundled with napi release and versions available at Download