BESSY II Datathon 2026¶
Welcome - this site hosts the documentation for the BESSY II Datathon 2026, a hands-on lunch-to-lunch workshop with the goal of standardizing science through FAIR data
In this event you will turn raw instrument data into fully FAIR, community-standard NeXus files, upload them to a shared NOMAD instance, and make them searchable for anyone. By the end you will have a working data conversion pipeline for your own data.
What you will learn¶
| NeXus | How the community file format works and why it makes data reusable |
| NeXus application definitions | Writing the schema that describes your own experiment |
| pynxtools | Python package for working with NeXus data |
| NOMAD | Upload, explore, filter, and share your data on a research data platform |
Before we start¶
Use the "Getting started" page to setup your environment. Each challenge page contains the goal and the files you will receive.
Optionally, you can already learn more about NeXus:
Agenda¶
Day 1 — Building a parsing pipeline¶
On day 1, we will build an end-to-end parsing pipeline for converting an example data set into NeXus and visualizing it in NOMAD.
| Time | Session | Page |
|---|---|---|
| 12:00 | Registration and Welcome | — |
| 13:00 | Inspiration: Familiarize with NeXus and NOMAD | Home |
| 13:45 | Session 0 — Setup for day 1 (15 min) | Setup |
| 14:00 | Session 1 — Write a simple application definition (1 h) | Application definitions |
| 15:00 | Coffee break | — |
| 15:30 | Session 2 — Build a small pynxtools reader (1 h) | Reader workshop |
| 16:30 | Session 3 — Upload to NOMAD (45 min) | NOMAD |
| 17:15 | Feedback + open questions | — |
| 17:30 | End of Day 1 | — |
Day 2¶
On day 2, we split up:
- either you work on your own data or
- you work on the provided challenges
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09:00 | Recap + open questions |
| 09:15 | Session 4 — Working on challenges or your own data |
| 11:00 | Break |
| 11:15 | Session 5 — Continue session 4 |
| 12:40 | Presentation — show and tell |
| 13:00 | Close |
Challenges¶
These are four data challenges on converting mySpot cuvette-scan experimental data into the NeXus format using pynxtools.
You can see them all on the overview page:
Working on your own data¶
If you brought your own data, you can also work directly on converting those to NeXus.
Learn more on this page:
Resources¶
| Resource | URL |
|---|---|
| pynxtools documentation | fairmat-nfdi.github.io/pynxtools |
| pynxtools plugin template | github.com/FAIRmat-NFDI/pynxtools-plugin-template |
| NeXus definitions | fairmat-nfdi.github.io/nexus_definitions |
| NeXus manual | manual.nexusformat.org |
| NOMAD | nomad-lab.eu |