Conference overview
An International Workshop on Crystallographic Raw Data Management will be held in Bloomington April 26, 27, and 28. Approximately forty participants representing university and national laboratories in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe will examine current practices and discuss standards that will allow researchers to more easily share data from one facility to another.
Crystallography is a technique that allows scientists to precisely determine the structure of molecules by studying the diffraction patterns produced by high intensity X-radiation. Understanding the detailed molecular structures of compounds is critical to most fields of science and medicine. The experiments for a single study can produce many gigabytes of data in a short period of time. While most major research universities have laboratories that can yield crystallographic data, it is often necessary to utilize equipment from other facilities better optimized for the material being studied. One of the aims of the workshop is to insure that data collected at one site can easily be located, accessed and interpreted in other laboratories.
There are many difficult problems related to managing large volumes of data in general and that produced by crystallography in particular. This workshop will look at data and metadata standards, intellectual property rights, and long term data stewardship issues, and will identify important, new research areas in data management and formats.
The workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the School of Informatics, the Molecular Structure Center in the Department of Chemistry, Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, the Pervasive Technology Laboratories and the IU Office of International Programs.
