The NeXus data format

• Published in: Journal of applied crystallography Vol. 48; no. 1
• Main Authors: Könnecke, Mark, Akeroyd, Frederick A., Bernstein, Herbert J., Brewster, Aaron S., Campbell, Stuart I., Clausen, Björn, Cottrell, Stephen, Hoffmann, Jens Uwe, Jemian, Pete R., Männicke, David, Osborn, Raymond, Peterson, Peter F., Richter, Tobias, Suzuki, Jiro, Watts, Benjamin, Wintersberger, Eugen, Wuttke, Joachim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States International Union of Crystallography 17-12-2014
• Subjects: CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY; data archiving; data exchange; HDF5; KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION; NeXus data format; platform-independent
• ISSN: 1600-5767; 1600-5767

NeXus is an effort by an international group of scientists to define a common data exchange and archival format for neutron, X-ray and muon experiments. NeXus is built on top of the scientific data format HDF5 and adds domain-specific rules for organizing data within HDF5 files, in addition to a dictionary of well defined domain-specific field names. The NeXus data format has two purposes. First, it defines a format that can serve as a container for all relevant data associated with a beamline. This is a very important use case. Second, it defines standards in the form of application definitions for the exchange of data between applications. NeXus provides structures for raw experimental data as well as for processed data.