Goals of openMicroanalysis project

[Hendrix Demers]

In this post I will describe the goals we (Hendrix Demers, Raynald Gauvin, Philippe Pinard and Silvia Richter) have for the openMicroanalysis project. These goals will evolve as more people participate in the project.

As mentioned on the website openmicroanalysis.org:

openMicroanalysis is a community-driven open source project quantitative electron microanalysis. Its goals are to:

• centralize physical quantity databases and algorithms used for quantification
• encourage collaborative work
• provide the necessary building blocks for new projects in microanalysis

These goals are general to allow the inclusion of many idea and people. After the first discussion meeting at EMAS2015 (a resume of the meeting should be posted soon), it was clear that the form and goals of open source microanalysis code are different for everybody. Which is good and it is why we chose these general goals. 

Now I will try to explain my (Hendrix) own goals for the project. Over my academic career as student and researcher, I have develop a lot of code related to microanalysis either from previous code developed by our group or developing them from scratch. At the same time, we start to share our code between the four of us (Hendrix Demers, Raynald Gauvin, Philippe Pinard and Silvia Richter), but as the code was not initially developed to be shared, it was and still is difficult to use. We have release some projects as open source projects, but only after the projects were finished and no real community were build around these projects. So I (we) hope by asking the community participation at the beginning of the project, we will be able to build better and useful code with an active discussion about it. Another aspect is to help generate new project or test new idea in microanalysis by making all the basic building blocks (MAC database, cross section, k-ratio data, etc.) needed to perform microanalysis available. So a researcher or group can start to work on their idea as soon as possible and concentrate on their new idea knowing that the community have tested the basic building blocks. The last part implied that the advantage of open source is that other can read, test and discuss the code and help to improve quality and accuracy of the code. 

Another example of personal goals for the project is given by John Donovan in the discussion how to open source CalcZAF: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/openmicroanalysis/j7PjyT4Y_LM/UOFodRACilcJ.

Finally, I would like to know your personal goals for the openMicroanalysis project and you don't have to be a code developer to share your opinion or idea what the project could do for you. You could share with us as an user of the microanalysis software (like CalcZAF) or as microscopist.

Hendrix