Browsing by Author "Hall, S"

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    Taking our raw data to the next level
    (Society of Crystallographers in Australia and New Zealand, 2017-12-03) Hester, JR; Hall, S
    The advent of computers and consequent high-volume data generation has led to a chronic separation of scientific results from the underlying evidence. Efforts are underway to both preserve the raw data in repositories and to resurrect the link between the measurements and the results. These raw data repositories would be much more valuable if they presented a uniform interface that allows third-party software and web-based tools to access and manipulate arbitrary raw data without requiring local or ad-hoc knowledge. Technical barriers to this simple-sounding objective include heterogeneous file formats and storage layouts, ill-defined notions of ‘dataset’, inconsistent metadata, and an underdeveloped system for data citation. Recent developments in the CIF world suggest that these technical issues are manageable within a relatively simple framework, and this opens the way for an intelligent raw data repository. The unification of the Australian Synchrotron and OPAL under the ANSTO umbrella provides a new opportunity for a significant proportion of Australia’s raw crystallographic data to be made available in this way, if there is sufficient support within the scientific community.