Crystallography Online

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