Crystallography Online: the website of the International Union of Crystallography

Dear Colleagues,

    I could use your help, in the form of supporting letters, in requesting
funding for the second and third workshops in the synchrotron image
data management series.  I apologize for the mass mailing,
but a short deadline funding opportunity has come up, and if any
of you can help out, it would be appreciated.

    As you know, Bob Sweet and I are organizing the series of three
workshops on the management of synchrotron images with the
encouragement and cooperation of the Data, Standards, and Computing
Committee of the American Crystallographic Association (ACA).  The
first workshop (the summer 2006 workshop) will be held in conjunction
with the summer 2006 ACA meeting in Hawaii. The second workshop (the
2006-2007 workshop) will be held at Brookhaven National Laboratory
(BNL) or nearby during the 2006-2007 academic year.  The third and
final workshop (the summer 2007 workshop) will be held in conjunction
with the summer 2007 ACA meeting in Salt Lake City.

   The arrangements for the first workshop are coming along nicely.
We have commitments of support from DOE and NSF, as well as sponsorship
from ADSC for the coffee breaks.  It is time to start on arranging
funding for the other two workshops.  DOE has already committed
support for the third workshop, but it would be very helpful
to have more support for both the second and third workshops, and
a program officer at one of the agencies asked me submit an
application with a deadline of next Friday, which of course
actually means earlier in the week.

   I would appreciate whatever supporting letters we can get in the
form of plain text email or in the form of a pdf attached to email.
It does not have to be pretty.  It just has be be sincere.  The
supporting letter should address:

   1.  The importance of the standardization of image formats
for the management of synchrotron data in protein crystallography
and other high data volume efforts.

   2.  The importance of having these workshops to achieve community
consensus on this issue.

   3.  If you will be participating in any of the workshops,
please mention the fact that you will be attending, but even if
you will not be attending, if you agree that these workshops will
be important, your support would be appreciated.

   4.  Any other kind words that you wish to say that will help
to generate a sense of community support for what we are doing.

if time does not allow you to respond right now, letters of
support will be appreciated at any time in the next month or two,
but if we can get a few of them now, it would be helpful.

   Thank you.

   Regards,

     Herbert

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Objective of the workshops:

There will be two objectives for the summer 2006 workshop: to
encourage adoption of the existing IUCr standard for image data,
imgCIF/CBF, and to map out the ways that this standard can be
extended through new, emerging standards to achieve maximal data
portability.  If the first workshop is successful, the participants
will leave with a clear roadmap to the adoption of an agreed approach
to achieving data portability.

The objectives of the 2006-2007 workshop will be to resolve the,
hopefully few, open issues in the standard itself and to discuss and
resolve problems encountered during the adoption effort since the
summer 2006 workshop.

The objective of the summer 2007 workshop will be to educate the
community on the newly adopted standard and to move from development
to maintenance and dissemination.

These three workshops will be working meetings for standards
developers and software developers to help achieve a community
consensus on data formats and software interfaces to help users in
transferring data among data-reduction and -visualization software,
and all three will be open to the entire crystallographic community.
The participation of software developers, beam line users, equipment
vendors, and other members of the crystallographic community is
encouraged.


-- 
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  Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
    Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
         Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

               Office:  +1-631-244-3035
            Lab (KSC 020): +1-631-244-3451
                  yaya at dowling.edu
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