Hi Folks,

As some of you may have heard, there will be a virtual Q2XAFS (Quality and Quantity for X-ray Absorption Fine Structure) symposium series this summer, with presentations from Working Groups defined and formed at the 2023 Q2XAFS meeting in Melbourne last August.  Details for this summer’s series are at https://sites.google.com/view/q2xafs/home, including a registration form.

I will be giving the first of the presentations, on July 26 (0600 Seattle, 1400 London, 2200 Tokyo), describing the work of a Working Group on Data Formats and Metadata.   Our Working Group has made good progress on defining a NeXuS/HDF5 definition for XAS data which is compatible with XDI and fits the typical NeXuS/HDF5 requirements.  We have started working on tools to convert between XDI, NeXuS/HDF5, and even to help convert “raw” beamline data into this format, to make it easy to convert raw beamline data into these two formats for uploading to databases, data portals, supplemental information, etc.

We have a pretty good collection of “real-world, as-collected” XAS data (see https://github.com/XraySpectroscopy/pynxxas/tree/main/xas_beamline_data) that we are working with as test cases.  Please let us know if the data you get from your facility is in some other format (including binary files such as HDF5, or even into some database or “document store”).  That is, if Larix or Athena struggles to read your data files, please let us know.   If you can, please send an example file (you can send it directly to me or use https://github.com/XraySpectroscopy/pynxxas).