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canSAS II - Organizers' report

  • Subject: canSAS II - Organizers' report
  • From: "John D. Barnes" <john.barnes@nist.gov>
  • Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 11:26:04 -0400
Note: This summary may be biased by the views of its author. Persons who 
have other views of the situation are invited to post their own analyses.

CanSAS II - Data Handling for Small-Angle Scattering
a workshop at SAS 99 , 16 May 1999

Ninety plus small-angle scattering devotees gave up a Sunday on May 16th 
1999 to participate in a "Data Handling for Small-Angle Scattering" 
workshop. The session was held at Brookhaven National Lab as a prelude to 
the worldwide SAS 99 Congress. The workshop was under the sponsorship of 
IUCr Commission on Small-Angle Scattering. John Barnes, the chair of the 
Commission, was the lead organizer. The workshop also carried the label 
"canSAS II" in commemoration of the first effort of this genre, help in 
Grenoble in February of 1998.

For those who do not know "canSAS" stands for "Collective Aid to Nomadic 
Small-Angle Scatterers. While CanSAS I targeted "instrument responsible" 
individuals CanSAS II targeted the general SAS user in an attempt to 
demonstrate that the entire SAS community has a stake in data handling 
issues.

Following introductions by Wim Bras, representing canSAS I, and John 
Barnes the agenda topics were:

"Using Statistics to Assess SAS Data Quality" - John Barnes
"Resolution Issues in SAS" _ John Barker, NIST
"Modeling and Goodness of Fit in SAS Data Reduction" - Jan Skov Pedersen, 
Risoe
"sasCIF - A Proposed Standard for 1-d SAS" Marc Malfois and Dmitri 
Svergun, EMBL
"One User's Experience with Nexus" - Joachim Kohlbrecher, PSI
"Existing Tools for SAS Nomads" - Richard Heenan, ISIS

These presentations were followed by a panel discussion entitled "What 
does the SAS Community need?" that was moderated by Tom irving of the 
APS. What little controversy there was revolved around the conflict 
between those who want to see software to move data between formats and 
those who feel that standardized data formats would be in the best 
interest of the community. This conflict is unlikely to be resolved until 
the community has had a chance to work with more examples of standardized 
formats.

Dr. John D. Barnes               email: john.barnes@nist.gov
Natl Inst of Stds and Tech       Voice: 301-975-6786
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8544        FAX: 301-975-4977
Gaithersburg, MD 20899             URL: http://www.nist.gov/sas
  or http://polymers.msel.nist.gov/staff/detail.cfm?SID=110