From 22 to 23 August 2015, in Rovinj (Croatia), the International Union of Crystallography, which is a member of CODATA, held, through its Diffraction Data Deposition Working Group, a Metadata workshop to define the need for and practicalities of routine deposition of primary experimental data in X-ray diffraction and related experiments.
The workshop took the form of a two-day satellite of the 29th European Crystallographic Meeting with lectures from crystallographic practitioners, data management specialists and standards maintainers.
The videos of all the presentations and discussions during the workshop “Metadata for raw
data from X-ray diffraction and other structural techniques” are now available through the workshop web page at: http://www.iucr.org/resources/data/dddwg/rovinj-workshop
The event, graciously described by one participant as “an inspiring workshop on what was nominally a rather dry subject”, gathered over 20 experts to critically review the central importance of detailed metadata to proper scientific practice.
It also considered the challenges of acquiring, sharing and validating high-quality metadata, especially in the age of high-throughput ‘Big Data’ experiments; and the best approaches to interoperability amongst diverse workflows, file formats and granularity of descriptive ontologies.
This archive will serve to provide a comprehensive review of the state of the art of metadata definition and use across many of the scientific fields using X-ray crystallographic and related structural techniques.
As the scope of this Workshop has broadened from its original conception, various research institutes and universities sent their experts to take part in this event.
Support for technical services and associated staffing costs have been contributed by Dectris, IUC Journals, CODATA, the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, Bruker, FIZ Karlsruhe/ICSD, Oxford Cryosystems and Wiley.
Another important sponsor of this event: the Croatian Association of Crystallographers
gave its active help in securing the best possible Workshop to address this important topic.
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