FAIRMAT
News
Events

FAIRmat Community Meets Technology Partners Workshops

2nd Workshop:

August 21, 2024, Online

On August 21, 2024, we organized a workshop as part of the "FAIRmat Community Meets Technology Partners Workshops" series, focusing on "Data Exchange and Storage in Ellipsometry." This workshop was held back to back, with a second workshop focused on Raman spectroscopy. Both techniques are of significant interest to our community.

The workshop brought together scientific and technical experts to explore the future of data structures for optical spectroscopy methods, emphasizing ellipsometry. We stressed the importance of FAIR data within the scientific community and its long-term value to society. We introduced and explained the NeXus standard and discussed its current implementation for ellipsometry. While we gathered valuable ideas for future improvements, the feedback was positive, and the current standard was widely accepted.

Additionally, we held a detailed "how-to" session to demonstrate the essential steps for creating NeXus files using Python. Python provides easy access to NeXus as a FAIR data format, enabling lab integration for simple measurement setups. Finally, we outlined the goals and ideas for the next workshop.

 

1st Workshop

Community Agrees on NXellipsometry

Thanks to the German National Research-Data Infrastructure (NFDI) project FAIRmat, ellipsometry users from several research institutes and technology partners from industry came together in a workshop on 22-23 September 2022.

Following on from the NFDI-NeXus virtual workshop in March, 2022, this hybrid event provided an opportunity for discussing FAIR data management, and specifically a standardized exchange and storage format for data and metadata in ellipsometry experiments.

This event brought a great success by aligning the scientific community and the technology partners towards the goal of FAIR data handling in ellipsometry. The discussion was focused on reviewing a specific application definition, NXellipsometry, in detail. This application definition has already been accepted by the NeXus International Advisory Committee (NIAC) and released as a contributed definition to the NeXus standard. Suggestions for improvements are still being collected and will be implemented and released in the next version of NXellipsometry.

It was great to see the strong interest of ellipsometry users along with their technology partners on developing standards for the description of ellipsometric measurements and data. FAIRmat is happy to celebrate the success of the first workshop in our “Community Meets Technology Partners” series and will promote similar solutions on FAIR data management and standardisation for other experimental fields and a wider range of the German materials science community.

Materials from this workshop: