Speaker
Description
Metadata standardization at complex scientific facilities, such as synchrotron light sources, is a challenging task due to the diversity of instruments, sample types, experimental techniques, acquisition strategies, and scientific questions supported by these facilities. Current approaches for standardizing metadata storage in NeXus files commonly focus solely on the sample-data acquisition stage and do not treat beamline experiments as a multi-stage procedure. As a result, they often fail to provide a complete view of the metadata from all experiment stages, limiting data and metadata organization, traceability, and explainability.
Assonant is a Python-based package developed at Sirius focused on automating transformations and writing collected metadata to NeXus-compliant files. Its main goal is to be a flexible and extensible tool capable of removing the burden of metadata standardization tasks from beamline staff and control system developers by handling those tasks transparently.
This work presents the status of Assonant and its integration within an automatic metadata writer service developed at Sirius. Such integration has quickly enabled data standardization capabilities in Bluesky-based beamline control systems in a transparent and decoupled way. Although the current implementation focuses on Bluesky-based beamlines, it is designed to be extensible beyond this context.
Additionally, this work covers the current NeXus structure proposed for Sirius beamlines and adopted by Assonant to standardize metadata through a multi-stage approach rather than a sample data acquisition-centered model. The proposed structure reflects the multi-stage nature of beamline experiments by explicitly organizing metadata across experiment stages, improving overall metadata organization, traceability, and explainability.
