Engineering

A well-established standard file structure for the archiving and distribution of crystallographic information, CIF is in regular use for reporting crystal structure determinations to Acta Crystallographica and other journals.

Sponsored by the International Union of Crystallography, the current standard dates from 1997. As of July 2011, a new version of the CIF standard is under consideration.

A study-data oriented model, primarily in support of the ICAT data managment infrastructure software. The CSMD is designed to support data collected within a large-scale facility’s scientific workflow; however the model is also designed to be generic across scientific disciplines.

Sponsored by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, the latest full specification available is v 4.0, from 2013.

EngMeta is an XML-based formal definition of information necessary to find, understand, reproduce and reuse data from engineering disciplines. The schema was defined together with engineers from aerodynamics and thermodynamics and lies a focus on computational engineering, but is general enough to cover other engineering disciplines.

EngMeta defines metadata-fields for the description of the components of the observed system (object of research), the observed variables, the spatial and temporal resolution of the observation and the steps taken in the research process to generate, process, analyse and visualize the data. It is based on existing standards like DataCite, PREMIS, CodeMeta and ExptML and is implemented as two metadata blocks for repositories based on the open-source repository platform Dataverse.

NeXus is an international standard for the storage and exchange of neutron, x-ray, and muon experiment data. The structure of NeXus files is extremely flexible, allowing the storage of both simple data sets, such as a single data array and its axes, and highly complex data and their associated metadata, such as measurements on a multi-component instrument or numerical simulations. NeXus is built on top of the container format HDF5, and adds domain-specific rules for organizing data within HDF5 files in addition to a dictionary of well-defined domain-specific field names.