| June 1994: | Mark Könnecke (then ISIS, now PSI) made a proposal using netCDF
for the European neutron scattering community while working at ISIS |
|---|
| August 1994: | Jonathan Tischler (ORNL) proposed an HDF-based format
as a standard for data storage at APS |
|---|
| October 1994: | Ray Osborn convened a series of three workshops called
SoftNeSS.
In the first meeting,
Mark Könnecke and Jon Tischler were invited to meet with representatives
from all the major U.S. neutron scattering laboratories
at Argonne National Laboratory to discuss future software
development for the analysis and visualization of neutron data.
One of the main recommendations of SoftNeSS‘94
was that a common data format should be developed. |
|---|
| September 1995: | At SoftNeSS 1995 (at NIST),
three individual data format proposals by
Przemek Klosowski (NIST),
Mark Könnecke (then ISIS),
and Jonathan Tischler (ORNL and APS/ANL)
were joined to form the basis of the current NeXus format.
At this workshop, the name NeXus was chosen. |
|---|
| August 1996: | The HDF-4 API is quite complex. Thus a NeXus Abstract Programmer Interface
NAPI
was released which simplified reading and writing NeXus files. |
|---|
| October 1996: | At SoftNeSS 1996 (at ANL),
after reviewing the different scientific data formats discussed,
it was decided to use HDF4
as it provided the best grouping support.
The basic structure of a NeXus file was agreed upon.
the various data format proposals were combined into a single document by
Przemek Klosowski (NIST), Mark Könnecke (then ISIS),
Jonathan Tischler (ORNL and APS/ANL), and Ray Osborn (IPNS/ANL)
coauthored the first proposal for the NeXus scientific data
standard. |
|---|
| July 1997: | SINQ at PSI started writing NeXus files to store raw data. |
|---|
| Summer 2001: | MLNSC at LANL started writing NeXus files to store raw data |
|---|
| September 2002: | NeXus API version 2.0.0 is released. This version brought support for the new
version of HDF, HDF5, released by the HDF group. HDF4 imposed limits on file
sizes and the number of objects in a file. These issues were resolved with
HDF5. The NeXus API abstracted the difference between the two physical file
formats away form the user. |
|---|
| June 2003: | Przemek Klosowski, Ray Osborn, and Richard Riedel
received the only known
grant explicitly for working on NeXus from the Systems Integration for Manufacturing
Applications (SIMA) program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST). The grant funded a person for one year to work on community wide infrastructure
in NeXus. |
|---|
| October 2003: | In 2003, NeXus had arrived at a stage where informal gatherings of a group of
people were no longer good enough to oversee the development of NeXus. This lead
to the formation of the NeXus International Advisory Committee (NIAC) which
strives to include representatives of all major stake holders in NeXus. A first
meeting was held at CalTech. Since 2003, the NIAC meets every year to discuss
all matters NeXus. |
|---|
| July 2005: | The community asked the NeXus team to provide an ASCII based physical file
format which allows them to edit their scientific results in emacs. This lead to
the development of a XML NeXus physical format. This was released with NeXus API
version 3.0.0. |
|---|
| May 2007: | NeXus API version 4.0.0 is released with broader support for scripting
languages and the feature to link with external files. |
|---|
| October 2007: | NeXus API version 4.1.0 is released with many bug-fixes. |
|---|
| October 2008: | NXDL: The NeXus Definition Language is defined.
Until now, NeXus used another XML format, meta-DTD, for defining base
classes and application definitions. There were several problems with meta-DTD,
the biggest one being that it was not easy to validate against it. NXDL was
designed to circumvent these problems. All current base classes and
application definitions were ported into the NXDL. |
|---|
| April 2009: | NeXus API version 4.2.0 is released with additional
C++, IDL, and python/numpy interfaces. |
|---|
