Scientific Data Management for Photon and Neutron Facilities

- Associated workshop to the RDA 11^th Plenary Meeting -

Berlin, 19^th and 20^th March 2018

Users of photon and neutron sources tend to move between facilities and instruments, using and combining different techniques, together with simulation data, to advance their science.  Furthermore, as open science becomes a standard, it will become more common for scientists to use data not collected by themselves in their analysis or to compare their own findings with other peoples data.

In order to be able to combine data from different sources or to make use of third party data, it is a requirement to complement the data with metadata at a sufficient level of detail to understand the meaning of those data.  Better standardization in the collection of metadata at the facilities will be major step to enable data sharing.

Well defined metadata and workflows are also a prerequisite for efficient data analysis.  Providing Data Analysis as a Service locally, in the cloud and across facilities will greatly benefit from open data, common standards, APIs and workflows.

In this workshop we will discuss new developments on

•  Metadata from the instruments (standardization, automatic capture, vocabularies)
•  Data formats (NeXus)
•  Unstructured metadata
•  Data analysis and cloud services