canSAS-II

Brookhaven, 16th May 1999

Convenors: J. Barnes, T. Irving

This one-day event took place at Brookhaven as a satellite meeting to SAS99. It served to inform the user community of the activities which had been successfully completed, and to stimulate future support for the high, but attainable, aims of the original working group.

Richard Heenan (ISIS) presented a review of his website where he had assembled references to SAS analysis programs. John Barker (NIST) discussed resolution issues in SANS, and Jan Skov Pederson continued the theme with goodness of fit in SANS data analysis. John Barnes(NIST) emphasised the need to retain objective error assessments with data. Mark Malfois (EMBL-Hamburg) presented the first draft for sasCIF, a comprehensive archive format for SAS data, based on the CIF standard. The dictionary terms chosen must be refined and accepted by the community before the standard is ratified with IUCR approval. This offers a very complete way of storing experimental attributes which matches the care needed in sample preparation and data measurement. Looking forward to more complex data formats in the future there was an introduction and some discussion on NeXus/HDF files, following a presentation by Joachim Kohlbrecher (PSI).

During the open discussion lead by Tom Irving (BioCAT), sites were urged to take up either sasCIF or NeXus, to give feedback to the Community. He, himself, would follow this route, and Wim Bras (DUBBLE) also agreed to use his beamline as a testbed.

The CCP13 project (Fibre Diffraction) was turning towards other features of SAS, and sites were encouraged to invite Mark Shotton, who is the principal maintainer of the collection, to visit and learn of these other activities.

While many of the original canSAS working group were present, it was clear that there would be no opportunity in the following days to convene in competition with the main SAS99 event. The best advances would come through proposing another small canSAS technical meeting, say in 2001, which could in turn report to the SAS community at the triennial meeting in Venice in 2002.

Overheads of the report of canSAS I outcomes presented courtesy of Wim Bras.