XAS Data Interchange

This README file explains the XAS Data Interchange (XDI) distribution. The XDI distribution contains the specification documents and various implementations of a formally specified system for reading and writing files containing single-scan XAS data.

This is a work in progress. Version 1.0 of the XDI specification has not yet been declared done.

Specification Documents

• The XDI specification, version 1.0.

• The metadata dictionary, version 1.0.

• Bruce's presentation on XDI at the XAFS16 satellite meeting on Data acquisition, treatment, storage – quality assurance in XAFS spectroscopy

Implementations

Implementations are found in directories named according to the programming language. The main C library is in lib/, all others are under languages.

At this time, we provide

• C (written by Matt Newville and Bruce Ravel)
• Python (written by Matt Newville)
• Perl (written by Bruce Ravel)
• Fortran 77 (written by Matt Newville)

We encourage the contribution of new language implementations, such as:

• Matlab
• IDL
• LabView
• Fortran 95 or later
• Java

and any other language that gets used by XAS practitioners.

The contents of a folder containing a language implementation should follow the package distribution conventions used by that language community. Unit testing is strongly encouraged. So is complete documentation of the building, installation, and use of the language package.

Build

cd into the lib/ directory and do:

~> ./configure
~> make
~> sudo make install

This will install static and dynamic libraries to /usr/local/lib and header files to /usr/local/include.

Obviously, you will need a C compiler.

To build the language specific interfaces, cd to the folder under languages/ and follow the build instructions there.

Other files

• The binaries/ folder contains shared object compilations of the C interface, libxdifile for various common operating systems.

• The data/ folder contains examples of valid XDI files

• The baddata/ folder contains examples of files that fail to validate as XDI

• The doc/ folder contains the LaTeX source of the poster on XDI presented at the XAFS15 conference

• The filemagic folder contains tools for use by the Unix file determination system:

   ~> file -m magic data/co_metal_rt.xdi 
   data/co_metal_rt.xdi: XAS Data Interchange file -- XDI specification 1.0
  

  It also defines an icon and a registry entry for XDI files on Windows. (The Windows reg entry does not currently work)