EMAS2015 Discussion forum on open source software for quantitative microanalysis

[Hendrix Demers]

Dear colleagues,

We would like to invite you to a discussion forum on open source software for quantitative microanalysis on Tuesday May 5th, 2015 after the second day of the EMAS workshop in Portoroz, Slovenia.

It goes without saying that the microanalysis community heavily depends on software. Quantification software, simulation programs, and physical quantities databases are essential tools for today's microanalysts. Broadly speaking, these software can be classified into four categories: commercial (sold by instrumentation's manufacturers or third-party companies), personal/research group internal or not openly distributed (XFILM, PENELOPE), free to download and use (WinCasino, CalcZAF) and open source (DTSA-II, pyPENELOPE). Without a doubt all types of software play an important role in the community, but we strongly believe that only open source software can foster innovation while offering the same level of validation and transparency as peer-reviewed scientific work. Although closed source software may be based on published equations, they remain black boxes as other equations are sometimes used in running codes. Alternate implementations, further optimization or special cases are not shared with the users. Most importantly, commercial, private and free software are a barrier to innovate as they force scientists, who would like to improve or develop new algorithms, to start from scratch.

We would therefore propose to start a community-driven open source project to centralize physical quantity databases and algorithms used for quantification. The goal is to encourage collaborative work and provide the necessary building blocks for new projects in microanalysis.

The meeting will take place on:

Tuesday May 5th 2015

at 18:30 (after the workshop programme)

in the workshop's lecture hall in the Grand Hotel Bernadin

The provisional agenda of the meeting is:

- Presentation and justification of the project (R. Gauvin, S. Richter)

- Presentation of currently available software and development tools (P. Pinard)

- Discussion about preferred programming languages(s) and supported platform(s) (H. Demers)

- Discussion about project organization (S. Richter)

- Discussion regarding milestones / roadmap (R. Gauvin)

If you are interested in joining the meeting, please sign up here before March 15th, 2015:

https://tester.dfn.de/foodle/Open-source-software-forum-discussion-54c60

You can gladly forward this invitation to other colleagues that may be interested in joining the discussion.

Furthermore, we would like to encourage you participating at the workshop EMAS 2015. Information are available on the website www.microbeamanalysis.eu. The deadline of abstract submission is the February 28th, 2015.

Best regards,

Hendrix, Raynald, Philippe and Silvia