NIAC2008

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.

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

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. (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